Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach 9781501327209, 9781501327193, 9781501327179

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Sonic Thinking

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thinking|media Series Editors Bernd Herzogenrath Patricia Pisters

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Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Bernd Herzogenrath, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Herzogenrath, Bernd, 1964– author. Title: Sonic thinking : a media philosophical approach / Bernd Herzogenrath. Description: New York, NY, USA : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc, [2017] | Series: Thinking media | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016034486 (print) | LCCN 2016048410 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501327209 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501327179 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501327186 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Sound (Philosophy) | Thought and thinking. | Mass media. Classification: LCC B105.S59 H47 2017 (print) | LCC B105.S59 (ebook) | DDC 10–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034486 ISBN :

HB : ePub: ePDF :

978-1-5013-2720-9 978-1-5013-2718-6 978-1-5013-2717-9

Series: thinking|media Cover design: Catherine Wood Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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Contents Acknowledgments Contributors

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sonic thinking—An Introduction Bernd Herzogenrath

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Time|Place|Memory: Artistic Research as a Form of Thinking-Through-Media Krien Clevis

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sonic thought i Walking into Sound Lasse-Marc Riek

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Soundscape as a System and an Auditory Gestalt Sabine Breitsameter

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Memories of Memories of Memories of Memories: Remembering and Recording on the Silent Mountain Angus Carlyle

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sonic thought ii Thaumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and Non-Thinking Thomas Köner

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sonic thought iii The Sounds of Things Heiner Goebbels

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Sonic Thought

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in|human rhythms

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Sound Without Organs: Inhuman Refrains and the Speculative Potential of a Cosmos-Without-Us Jason Wallin and Jessie Beier

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Buzzing off . . . Toward Sonic Thinking

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Christoph Cox Bernd Herzogenrath

Christoph Lischka

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Contents

Sound Beyond Nature | Sound Beyond Culture, or: Why is the Prague Golem Mute? Jakob Ullmann

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10 One Dimensional Music Without Context or Meaning Mark Fell

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11 How to Think Sonically? On the Generativity of the Flesh Holger Schulze

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12 Immanent Non-Musicology: Deleuze|Guattari vs. Laruelle Achim Szepanski

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13 Sonic Figure: The Sound of The Black Soft Julia Meier

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14 Images of Thought | Images of Music Adam Harper

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15 Digital Sound, Thought

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Aden Evens

sonic thought iv Sonotypes Sebastian Scherer Index

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Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to bloomsbury (in particular the wonderful Katie Gallof and Mary Al-Sayed) for giving us and me the opportunity to publish this book, and to all those wonderful people that contributed to this volume—it has been a pleasure! Special thanks go out to Sebastian Scherer, for all the work you have put into this! I dedicate this book to Janna and Claudia, and to the memory of Frank. Two-and-a-half of the essays in this book had a previous life in onlinejournals, in slightly different versions: Christoph Cox’s essay appeared as slightly different versions in Artpulse 16 (2013) and Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (Berlin: Sternberg Press 2015). Achim Szepanski’s essay also appeared in a slightly different version in Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (Berlin: Sternberg Press 2015). A small part of Bernd Herzogenrath’s essay already appeared as “The ‘Weather of Music’: Sounding Nature in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2009, 216–32. . . . all republished with kind permission.

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Contributors Jessie Beier is a teacher, artist, and independent scholar based in Edmonton, Alberta. Beier completed a Masters Degree in Curriculum Studies in 2014 with the thesis project “Schizophrenizing the Art Encounter: Towards a Politics of Dehabituation.” Beier’s interests in both visual and sonic ecologies have led to a research and writing practice that works to think art, in its many forms, as a power for overturning cliché and dismantling common sense habits of interpretation. Beier has worked in a variety of settings as a researcher, educator, and program developer and currently teaches in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta. In addition to her scholarly work, Beier is also a practising artist and musician, working mainly in video and sound installation. Beier has presented her research locally and nationally, and has published writing in Visual Arts Research (University of Illinois Press), The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (Taylor and Francis), and The Alberta Journal of Educational Research (University of Alberta). Sabine Breitsameter is an expert on experimental electroacoustic art forms. She has been working since the mid-1980s for German public radio within the field of radio drama and documentary as author, director and dramaturge, and as a festival director and curator for, e.g., Documenta/Kassel, Academy of Arts/Berlin, Ars Electronica/ Linz, and ZKM Karlsruhe. As a professor for “Sound and Media Culture” she researches and teaches at Hochschule Darmstadt/Germany since 2006. She co-founded the Master program “Soundstudies” at the University of Arts Berlin, where she worked as a guest professor for Experimental Audiomedia from 2004 to 2008. Her publications include Die Ordnung der Klänge“ (Schott International 2010): a new ” German edition and translation of R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World, writings on listening culture, audiomedia history, and viii

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currently on her research project in progress exploring 3D audio and 360° cinema. Angus Carlyle is a researcher at CR iSAP at the University of the Arts, London, where he is Professor of Sound and Landscape. He edited the book Autumn Leaves (2007), co-edited On Listening (2013) and co-wrote In The Field (2013). His art works have included 51° 32′ 6.954″ N/0° 00′ 47.0808″ W (2008), Noli Me Tangere (2009), Some Memories of Bamboo (2009) and Air Pressure (2011–2013), a collaboration with anthropologist Rupert Cox. His new project with Cox, Zawawa (2015–) extends Carlyle’s fascination with the heard world of people and place, memory and presence. In 2016, A Downland Index, a book-length experiment in nature writing was published by uniformbooks and the album In The Shadow of the Silent Mountains, an intersection between text, image and sound, was released by Gruenrekorder. www.anguscarlyle.com Krien Clevis has been active as an artist, researcher and curator. As a professor in the Arts Faculty Maastricht, she teaches Artistic Research in the Fine Arts department. She is involved in a post-doc project at the Lectureship Autonomy and Public Sphere in the Arts at the same faculty. In Rome she has performed research on the Via Appia, in collaboration with archaeological researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen and the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome (KNIR ). She earned a PhD by writing a dissertation, entitled LOCVS . Herinnering en vergankelijkheid in de verbeelding van plaats: van Italische domus naar artistiek environment/LOCVS . Memory and Transience in the Representation of Place: From Italic Domus to Artistic Environment (Amsterdam: Jan de Jong/De Buitenkant 2013). This PhD project was devoted to artistic research of the notion of quality of “place,” through a consideration of archaeological and other debates on place and study of the physical and qualitative features of place, especially in historical sites. As an artist she creates new places of meaning: places caught within a dynamics of change and subject to being overwritten all

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the time. Major concepts in her research are genius loci, palimpsest and lieux de mémoire. By combining artistic, historical/archaeological and personal exploration of locations, she aims to add new meanings to the multilayered dimension of places. Christoph Cox is Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He is the author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (forthcoming) and Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (California, 1999) and co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg 2015) and Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum 2004). The recipient of an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, Cox is editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine. His writing has appeared in October, Artforum, Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Wire, Journal of Visual Culture, Organised Sound, The Review of Metaphysics, and elsewhere. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Kitchen, New Langton Arts, the G Fine Art Gallery, and the Brick & Mortar International Video Art Festival. Aden Evens is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. His research and teaching zig-zags across disciplinary lines, drawing on training in music, mathematics, software engineering, and philosophy. His 2005 monograph, Sound Ideas (University of Minnesota Press), takes a phenomenological and technological approach to the study of music, helping to usher in the nascent field of sound studies. His book, Logic of the Digital (Bloomsbury Academic 2015), traces the potentials and pitfalls of digital technologies by examining their underlying technical bases. If there is a piano, Aden will probably play it, which is either delightful or annoying, depending on how far away you are sitting. Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield (UK ). After studying experimental film and video art at Sheffield City Polytechnic he initially reverted to earlier interests in computational technology,

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music, and synthetic sound. In 1998 he began a series of critically acclaimed record releases on labels including Mille Plateaux, Line, Editions Mego and Raster Noton. Fell is widely known for combining popular music styles, such as electronica and club musics, with typically academic approaches to computer-based composition with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. Since his early electronic music pieces Fell’s practice has expanded to include moving image works, sound and light installation, choreography, critical texts and educational projects. The diversity and importance of Fell’s practice is reflected in the range and scale of international institutions that have presented his work, which include: Hong Kong National Film archive, The Baltic (Gateshead), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Laboral (XI xon), The Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), The Serpentine (London), The Australian Centre For Moving Image, Artists Space (NYC ), Issue Project Room (NYC ), Corcoran (DC ), Curtis R.Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (NY ), Lampo/Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), Hanger Biccoca (Milan) and others. Fell’s work is in the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna) and has also been recognized by ARS Electronica (Linz). Heiner Goebbels (born 1952) graduated in sociology and music. The German composer and director has created music theater works and staged concerts, radio works, and compositions for ensemble and for big orchestras (Surrogate Cities). As a composer he collaborates with the finest ensembles, orchestras, and conductors. Since the beginning of the 1990s he composed and directed unique and celebrated music theater works such as Black on White (1996), Max Black (1998), Eislermaterial (1998), Hashirigaki (2000), Landscape with distant relatives (2002), Eraritjaritjaka (2004), Stifters Dinge (2007), Songs of Wars I have seen (2007), I went to the house but did not enter (2008) and When the

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Mountain changed its clothing (2012), which have been presented at the most important festivals in Europe, South- and North America, Australia and Asia. He created installative works for the Centre Pompidou Paris, MAC Lyon, Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Documenta Kassel, and others. In the last few years he has directed the rarely staged operas Europeras 1&2 by John Cage (2012), Delusion of the Fury by Harry Partch (2013), and De Materie by Louis Andriessen (2014). Heiner Goebbels is Professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen and President of Theatre Academy Hessen and has been awarded with many international record-, radio-, theater- and music-awards, the International Ibsen Award 2012, and with an honorary doctorate by Birmingham City University. From 2012 to 2014 he was artistic director of the “Ruhrtriennale—International Festival of the Arts.” Many CD s were released by ecm-records (two Grammy nominations); publications include Komposition als Inszenierung (2002) and Aesthetics of Absence (2015). Heiner Goebbels lives in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. For more information see: www.heinergoebbels.com Adam Harper is a musicologist who recently completed his PhD on lo-fi aesthetics at the University of Oxford. He is also a music critic writing for The Wire, The FADER , and others, and is the author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (Zero Books 2011), which argues for a reappraisal of modernist aesthetics and offers an infinitely flexible ontology of music based on variables and information. He has also written pamphlets on the future of music for the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts and, for London publisher Precinct, on underground pop music (Heaven is Real: John Maus and the Truth of Pop) and introduced and supervised a new English edition of a 1916 progressive musical manifesto by Ferruccio Busoni, Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music. He has given talks and seminars at the Darmstadt Summer School of Music, the Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna, and The Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University; he

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has spoken at the All Tomorrow’s Parties and CTM Berlin festivals, for Subba Cultcha in Brussels and Amsterdam, and for the Guardian Music Weekly Podcast; and has contributed to panel discussions hosted by The Wire, the South Bank Centre, Verso Books, Warwick University and the University of East London. Bernd Herzogenrath is professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire. Reading Paul Auster (Rodopi 2001), An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (Dartmouth College Press 2010) and editor of two books on Tod Browning, two books on Edgar G. Ulmer, and two books on Deleuze and Ecology. Other edited collections include The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams (Northeastern UP 2012), Time and History in Deleuze and Serres (Continuum 2012), and, most recently, media|matter (Bloomsbury 2014). At the moment, he is planning a project cinapses: thinking|film that brings together scholars from film studies, philosophy, and the neurosciences (members include Alva Noë and Antonio Damasio). Forthcoming publications include the edited collections The Films of Bill Morrison (Amsterdam University Press), and film as philosophy (University of Minnesota Press). Thomas Köner (born 1965 in Bochum, Germany) studied at the Musikhochschule Dortmund and CEM Studio Arnhem. He is a distinctive figure in the fields of contemporary music and multimedia art. For more than three decades his work has been internationally recognized and he excels in all the areas of his artistic activity, receiving awards such as Golden Nica Ars Electronica (Linz), Transmediale Award (Berlin), Best Young Artist at ARCO (Madrid), and many more. His familiarity with both the visual and sonic arts resulted in numerous commissions to create music for silent films for the Auditorium du Musée du Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, and others. Likewise, he created installations for diverse situations, for example ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art and the

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Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Santiago de Chile, to name but two. His works are part of the collections of significant museums such as Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou Paris, and Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal. Thomas Köner is continuing his close relationship with sound art by creating radiophonic works for the national radio in Germany (Deutschlandradio Kultur, WDR Studio Akustische Kunst), while also working as a live performer, composer and producer. His music compositions from the early 1990s, including albums Permafrost, Nunatak, and Teimo, were considered pioneering in the field of minimal electronics and are still in print. Köner’s acclaimed production skills with his more beat-oriented duo partner Porter Ricks, whose album Biokinetics is considered “a classic of techno sound,” resulted in remix commissions for amongst others Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails. Christoph Lischka studied Composition, Piano, Musicology, Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics at the Hochschule für Musik (Cologne), University of Cologne, and University of Bonn. He has worked as a programmer, software engineer, research scientist, artist, and university lecturer at several institutions, e.g., Hochschule für Musik in Aix-la-Chapelle (Music Theory), University of Cologne (Musicology), Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Art-related Sciences), and University of the Arts Bremen (Digital Media). He was a member of several scientific societies; (co-)organizer of many national and international conferences and workshops; and has many publications in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Music Theory, Foundations of Cognitive Science, Media Theory, and Philosophy. From 1986 to 1998 he was senior research scientist and group leader at Fraunhofer Research Institute (St. Augustine) in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics. From 1998 to 2005 he worked as a freelancing information architect and web developer, from 2005 to 2007 he was visiting professor at the University of the Arts Bremen (Digital Media, Robotics, Media Theory); and from 2007 to 2009 Professor at the University of the Arts Bremen (Autoactive Systems).

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Since 2010 he is an independent researcher and university lecturer in the field of poietic machines (a continuation of the newly established research in Autoactive Systems), where the focus is primarily on the interplay of philosophy, mathematics, computer sciences, sound art, and “convergent technologies,” particularly robotics and nanobiotechnology. Christoph Lischka lives in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). Julia Meier, PhD, is a lecturer and freelance writer who has worked in the field of contemporary art, film, fashion, philosophy, and music in Germany and in the United States. She is the recipient of several academic awards including the PhD fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD ). Meier was a visiting scholar at the Department of Comparative Studies at Stony Brook University, New York, where she conducted her doctoral research on David Lynch and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the logic of sensation. She has published various essays about the work of Gilles Deleuze, Diamanda Galás, Chris Cunningham, and Matthew Barney, among others. Meier taught at Leibnitz University Hannover, Germany, Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany, as well as at Stony Brook University, New York. She also worked as a curator for contemporary art at the Kestnergesellschaft Hanover, Germany. Her book Die Tiefe der Oberfläche (The Depth of the Surface): Lynch, Bacon, Deleuze has been published by Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin, Germany (2013). Lasse-Marc Riek (born 1975 in Germany) uses different forms of expression in his production methods. His works are interdisciplinary and can be conceived as groups of works of both visual art (action and conceptual art) and sound art. His art of sound can be described in terms such as acoustic ecology, bio acoustics and soundscapes. Here, Riek uses acoustic field recordings, storing them with different recording media, editing, archiving, and presenting them in different contexts. Since 1997, he has operated internationally with exhibitions, releases, concerts, lectures, workshops, awards, and projects and given guest

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performances in galleries, art museums, churches, and universities. He has made contributions in the public media as well as in podcasts and received scholarships and artist-in-residence programs realized in Europe and Africa. Since 2003 he is founding member of the audio publishing company Gruenrekorder, focusing on soundscapes, field recordings, and electro-acoustic compositions, and in this function, dealing internationally with artists and scientists. www.lasse-marc-riek.de and www.gruenrekorder.de Sebastian Scherer completed his MA in Art History and American Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2010. He subsequently taught International Journalism at the University for Applied Sciences in Darmstadt. Since 2011 he works as a scientific assistant for the American Studies department at Goethe University, where he teaches classes on American Avant-garde Music, the Electronic Frontier, and American Landscape Painting and Photography. His research interests include sound-studies, modern and contemporary art, music, and film, as well as audio-engineering, and American countercultures. Currently he is working on his PhD project on the artistic strategies of Christian Marclay. Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen as well as Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. He is the author of a generative theory of artifacts in three volumes: Das aleatorische Spiel (2000), Heuristik (2005), and Intimität und Medialität (2012). His research focuses on the cultural history of the senses, on a historical anthropology of media, and on sound in popular culture. He serves as founding editor of the “Sound Studies”-book series and as curator for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin. His recent publications are: Sabotage! (ed., 2013), Gespür (2014), American Progress (2015), and Sound as Popular Culture (ed., 2016). Achim Szepanski was born in Karlsruhe and studied Sociology in Frankfurt/Main. During the 1980s and 1990s he founded electronic

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music labels such as Force Inc., Mille Plateaux, Ritornell, Position Chrome and forcetracks. He wrote essays about Adorno, Marx, Deleuze| Guattari, Laruelle, etc. His latest work contains a trilogy of novels (Saal 6, Pole Position, and Verliebt ins Gelingen) and theoretical work. In 2014 he published with Laika the first two volumes of Capitalization (Vol. 1—Marx Non-Economy; Vol. 2—Non Economy of Contemporary Capitalism). The third volume, Der Non-Marxismus: Finance, Maschinen, Dividuum was published in 2016. Jakob Ullmann was born in 1958 in Freiberg in Saxony, studied church music and organ in Dresden (with Hans-Jürgen Scholze), took private lessons in composition with Friedrich Goldmann in Berlin, and in 2005 completed his DP hil (with Hannes Böhringer) in Braunschweig. Since 2008 he is professor for composition, musical notation, and music theory at the Musikakademie der Stadt Basel, Hochschule für Musik. Jason Wallin is Associate Professor of Media and Youth Culture Studies in Curriculum at the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he teaches courses in visual art, popular culture, and cultural curriculum theory. Jason is author of A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life (Palgrave Macmillan), co-author of Arts-Based Research: A Critique and Proposal (with Jan Jagodzinski, Sense Publishers), co-editor of Educational, Psychological, and Behavioral Considerations in Niche Online Communities (with Vivek Venkatesh, Juan Carlos Castro, and Jason Lewis, IGI Press), and co-editor of Deleuze, Guattari, Politics and Education (with Matt Carlin, Bloomsbury). Jason is assistant editor for the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (Routledge).

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sonic thinking—An Introduction Bernd Herzogenrath

I would like to start with a set of resonances. First of all, a resonance on the word “resonance”—on the one hand it means something like “echo,” or “reverberation,” on the other hand, the word “reason” is somehow hidden in “resonance.” The French verb résonner makes this resonance even stronger—one might even be tempted to invent the word re[a]sonance here. Thus, a kind of knowledge is involved here. A kind of thinking— maybe not what we would call rational thinking, but a kind of thinking nonetheless. As the Polish philosopher and mathematician Józef Hoëné-Wronski has it, as quoted by Edgar Varèse: “Music is the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound” (Varèse 1966: 17). Music as the becoming-body of the knowledge of sound—sound thinking. Again, also this knowledge that sound is, has a highly interesting resonance in its “wordhood” in French: connaître—knowledge as a process of “being-born-with”—this could mean that this knowledge, this thinking, this re[a]sonance, that sound is not a knowledge about the world, coming to you only in retrospective reflection, but a thinking of and in the world, a part of the world we live in, intervening in the world directly. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his unpublished early notebooks, dating from the period of his Unfashionable Observations (1872–3), relates the true philosopher to the scientist and the artist as listener: “The concept of the philosopher . . . : he tries to let all the sounds of the world reverberate in him and to place this comprehensive sound outside himself into concepts” (19[71], 115); whereas the artist lets the tones of 1

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the world resonate within him and projects them by means of percepts and affects. So, here, sound-art practice becomes research and philosophy, and vice versa. Rainer Maria Rilke, in his 1919 essay “Primal Sound” (Urgeräusch in the German original) described an experience he had as a young boy, when introduced to a phonograph for the first time, seeing how the needle produced sounds out of grooves in a wax cylinder, grooves that the recording of actual sounds had put there in the first place. Years later, while attending anatomical lectures in Paris, Rilke connected the lines of coronal suture of the human skull to his childhood observations—“I knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!” (2001: 22). From this incident, Rilke derives the following “experimental set-up”: “The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has—let us assume— a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally—well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?” (23). Rilke’s obvious answer, is, of course, noise, music—sound! Probing further, Rilke asks himself, “What variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?” (23). In a letter, Rilke specifies this idea. Writing to Dieter Bassermann, Rilke speculates on “set[ting] to sound the countless signatures of Creation which in the skeleton, in minerals . . . in a thousand places persist in their remarkable versions and variations. The grain in wood, the gait of an insect: our eye is practiced in following and ascertaining them. What a gift to our hearing were we to succeed in transmuting this zigzag . . . into auditory events!” (2007: 391–2).

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The project “sonic thinking” aims to serve two interconnected purposes: on the one hand it wants to develop an alternative philosophy of music that takes music seriously as a “form of thinking” (and that might revise our notion of what “thinking” means). On the other hand, it aims to bring this approach into a fertile symbiosis with the concepts and practices of “artistic research”: art, philosophy, and science as heterogeneous, yet co-equal forms of thinking and researching (and let me point out that we are using the concept of “artistic research” not in the meaning of art being a handmaiden subordinate to [and evaluated by] parameters of the sciences [a highly debatable practice], but more as a mediaphilosophical praxeology—artists [in this case: sound artists] thinking with and through their medium [in this case: sound]). The debate about the sphere of sound is presently fought with high intensity. The emerging field of research “Sound Studies” is primarily discussed in the humanities and social sciences—the “Acoustic Turn” is tackled with the means of cultural sciences and semiotics. These disciplines are however based on foundations that could not be more alien to music (or sound, noise—the “sonic field’). Deeply rooted in one of the major strands of western philosophy, the concepts of cultural studies and especially semiotics are based on what Gilles Deleuze calls “image of thought,” dependent on the metaphysics of being, representation, and identity. Accordingly, a (passive) nature, matter, etc., is “informed” extrinsically, a substance affects existence, the subject organizes (the objects of) experience, progress determines the course of history, etc. On the other hand, how Hans Jonas, among others, has demonstrated in his groundbreaking essay, “The Nobility of Sight” (1954) these foundations of western existential philosophy are in turn rooted in the ubiquity of a “visual regime”: a hierarchy of senses was established, in which the eye almost inevitably was declared the origin and foundation of all philosophy—central categories like “[in]finity,” “distance,” “abstraction,” and “objectivity,” are indebted to the intrinsic sensory qualities of visual perception. Since the twilight of the nineteenth century the consequences of this hierarchization of the senses (and the

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“supremacy” of the eye) are discussed with increasing intensity. In his treatise about the origin of tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche tried to regain the “aural culture” of the old, pre-platonic Greeks, and in a later note he hinted at the revolutionary implications for our culture, which a reorientation away from the eye towards the ear would trigger: “Images in the human eye! This governs the entire nature of the human being: from the eye! Subject! The ear hears sound! An entirely different, marvelous conception of the same world!” (19[66]: 25). Here Nietzsche is congruent with the bigger part of twentieth-century theoretical reflection, that deems the prioritization of the visual sense as the original sin of western thinking. As Jonas further explains, the concept of “simultaneity”—and eventually of “identity”—is an effect of the visual regime: visual perception constitutes a “co-temporaneous manifold . . . at rest” (1954: 507), the sense of hearing however “construct[s its] perceptual unities out of a temporal sequence of sensations” (ibid.). Thus the eye suggests the notion of a permanent existence we would not have, if we could merely resort to “time-senses” (like hearing and feeling). Music and sound, however, can also be considered the “other” of this ontology of being and the visual regime—ephemeral, a time-art, nonvisual. So what could be the nature of a “sound thinking”? Initially one would have to oppose (or accompany) the predominant discourses in sound studies to a philosophy that is process-orientated: an ontology of becoming, not of being, which recognizes entities as events and contingent actualizations of virtual potentiality, as a flow consisting of “variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds . . . phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or . . . of acceleration and rupture” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3–4); an “alternative” philosophical lineage, which relies on thinkers like Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze. This perspective transforms “givens” with a preset and stable taxonomy of particular functions and agencies into “a construction site of exploration and connection” (Cox 2003: 3). From this vantage point, the rigorous division between aesthetics and research (and the likewise rigorous division between the various

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related [academic] disciplines, e.g., “art” and “science”) can no longer be seriously upheld. Deleuze is also interested in “the relations between the arts, science, and philosophy. There is no order of priority among those disciplines” (1995: 123) for Deleuze. Whereas science involves the creation of functions, of a propositional mapping of the world, and art involves the creation of blocs of sensation (or affects and percepts), philosophy involves the invention of concepts. According to Deleuze|Guattari, philosophy, art, and science are defined by their relation to chaos. Whereas science “relinquishes the infinite in order to gain reference” (1994: 197), by creating definitions, functions and propositions, art, on the other hand, “wants to create the finite that restores the infinite” (197). In contrast, “philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it consistency” (197). Yet, since “sciences, arts, and philosophies are equally creative” (5), it might be fruitful, as Deleuze proposes, “to pose the question of echoes and resonances between them” (1995: 123)—that is, to pose the question of their ecology. As Deleuze specified in one of his seminars,“Between a philosophical concept, a painted line and a musical sonorous bloc, resonances emerge, very, very strange correspondences that one shouldn’t even theorize, I think, and which I would prefer to call ‘affective’ . . . these are privileged moments” (“Image Mouvement Image Temps”).1 These moments privilege an affect where thought and sensation merge into a very specific way of “doing thinking” beyond representation and categorization. The hiatus of art and research is the result of the idea of a linear process ranging from invention|concept (mental) to design (material realization). This however does not do justice to the complexity of the matter: mental and corporeal processes and interactions as well as “implicit/tacit/practical knowledge” become relevant on all levels, for all decisions. As Martin Tröndle has pointed out, conceptual cognitive and manual affective activities go hand in hand, the sensual examination of the material and emotional reactivity is also of highest

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importance. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in their idea of the “artisan” (rather than the “artist”): “It is a question of surrendering to the [materiality], then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form on matter: what one addresses is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos” (1987: 408). The mind is tightly embedded into the interplay between body, environment, and matter. This is the quintessence of Embodied Mind Philosophy. Alva Noë, one of its originators, even takes it a significant step further: for him the mind evolves from the movements of the body in its environment—the mind is not a substance that could be simply located within the confines of our skull. Consciousness is not “something that happens in us, like digestion”—it is rather “something we do . . . a kind of living activity . . . the ways in which each of us . . . carries on the process of living with and in response to the world around us” (2009: 7). Embodied Mind Philosophy, I argue, can stimulate a fertile resonance with the concept of artistic research: the artistic practice is here not (only) understood in terms of the finalized work of art (work-aesthetic), but rather in regard to the practices and strategies of artistic production (production-aesthetic). The process of the emergence of a work becomes the center of attention. Artists comprehend this process as the phase of examination or evolution of a work. With this shift from the work to artistic research comes also an altered handling of the work itself. It has become a medium of insight, at the latest since twentieth-century’s Modernity (cf., e.g., Clement Greenberg). The work materializes knowledge—beyond the aesthetic experience it facilitates comprehension of the world. Making art then means, initially programmatically in general, to explore something with the specific means of art, to discover something about the world. This entails that art does not solely comprehend itself as a medium of representation and that artistic production does not solely revolve around questions of depiction. This alleged reduction of the artistic to a mere tool serving questions of content, turns out to be an actual extension far beyond self-occupation and the function of representation.

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The artistic position does not ignore the dimension of aesthetic experience; it rather collaborates with it and perceives it as a mode of negotiable understanding. Not to be mistaken: it is not that art morphs into science. Art and science are rather poised in a force field of “mutual becoming.” As Julian Klein has noted, “[a]rtistic experience is an active, constructive and aesthetic process, in which mode and substance are fused inseparably. This differs from other implicit knowledge, which generally can be considered and described separately from its acquisition” (2010: 4)— (cf., e.g., John Dewey, Michael Polanyi, Gilles Deleuze, etc.). The reflection of artistic research occurs on the plane of artistic experience itself. This neither excludes an interpretation on a descriptive plane, nor a theoretical analysis on a meta-level. It is however a false conclusion to assume that reflection is only possible from the exterior: artistic experience is a form of reflection. And affect-driven artistic production can arrive at more singular thought-positions than purely rationally organized philosophical systems of thought. In the [American] musical avant-garde of the twentieth century these perspectives of music as a contraction of forces, currents, and speeds, coalesce with the notion of music as thinking, music as research—again, the “corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound” (Varèse and Wen-chung 1966: 17). Varèse did not describe himself as a composer, or musician, but rather as “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities” (18). Without any interest whatsoever in traditional categories like melody, pitch, or form, Varèse turned to sound itself, the exploration of tone, timbre, and volume. When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived in my work, taking the place of the linear counterpoint. When these sound-masses collide, the phenomena of penetration and repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be

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To regard “form as a point of departure, a pattern to be followed, a mold to be filled” (16)—as being, as object—would be a mistake. Referring to Busoni, Varèse postulates, “Form is a result—the result of a process” (ibid.), a process of an impersonal becoming, that is rather comparable to the formation of crystals than to any kind of “subjective intuition.” Also John Cage, Morton Feldman, the Minimalists, etc., committed themselves to the musical exploration of the virtual and processual field of music, to the liberation from human subjectivity towards a realm of the experience of sound itself (cf. also Cox 2003). As mediated by John Cage, a better part of the American musical avant-garde refers to the philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who conducted sound experiments at Walden Pond in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1851, Thoreau notes an acoustic experience in his journals that reveals his particular sensibility to his sonic environment: “Yesterday and to-day the stronger winds of autumn have begun to blow, and the telegraph harp has sounded loudly . . . the tone varying with the tension of different parts of the wire. The sound proceeds from near the posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid” (1962, III : 11). Far from being an isolated case, Thoreau focuses on the “sound of nature”—and in particular the “sound of the weather”—in various other entries in his journals: “Nature makes no noise. The howling storm, the rustling leaf, the pattering rain are no disturbance, there is an essential and unexplored harmony in them” (1962, I: 12). Thoreau is exploring the audible world like a sound-archaeologist, carefully distinguishing “sound” from “music:”2 To fellow-Transcendentalist Emerson, mind, not matter, is of prime importance—matter is only a manifestation of the mind. Thoreau, in contrast, stresses the material and sensual aspects of nature—“We need pray for no higher heaven

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than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life . . . Is not Nature . . . that of which she is commonly taken to be a symbol merely?” (1998: 307). Thoreau does not read nature like, does not interpret nature according to a spiritual principle external to it—such a principle, because of nature’s manifoldness, is immanent to it. For Thoreau, nature’s “music” is “the sound of circulation in nature’s veins” (1962, I: 251). It is in this stress on nature as sensuous experience and materiality that Thoreau “deviates” from Emerson. Thoreau focuses on [the music of] nature as a material, physical process, not as an Emersonian emblem of reason—“The very globe continually transcends and translates itself. . . . The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth” (1973: 306–7). “Transcendentalism” is understood by Thoreau completely “physical”— the natural, dynamic process of metamorphosis, of continuous change—transcendence becomes immanence. In his journals, Thoreau writes: “Now I see the beauty and full meaning of that word ‘sound.’ Nature always possesses a certain sonorousness, as in the hum of insects, the booming of ice . . . which indicates her sound state.” The pun on “sound” as acoustic sound and “sound” as a state of health even calls for a reference to Thoreau’s dictum “in wildness is the preservation of the world” (from his essay “Walking”). Here “wildness” refers to the untamed but also to anything that resists representation and any static thinking of identity: the continuous selfdifferentiation of the world, its growing, its dynamics, its processuality— here lies its “soundness” and also the “essence” of sound. Thus “sound thinking” does not only imply “the thinking of sound,” but also “healthy thinking,” or, as Deleuze puts it: a thinking that rightfully earns its name: a thinking that does not derive its parameters|concepts from an exterior “verified knowledge” (Deleuze calls this “recognition”) in order to adapt the object of investigation to these parameters, but rather a thinking that develops its very concepts from the examination of the object of investigation (Deleuze calls this “encounter”): here—a thinking with and by means of sound, not a thinking about sound, which eventually does not deal with the question what music is, but

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rather what music can become. And from this vantage point research and art, theory and practice, are coextensive. The following essays explore this realm of sound thinking—essays by scholars and philosophers, interspersed with “sonic thoughts” from a more artistic/practitioners’ direction. Krien Clevis—Time|Place|Memory: Artistic Research as a Form of Thinking-Through-Media Art can be motivated by the desire to map current social issues or concerns addressed within a particular discourse (without actively participating in it), while art may also be used to initiate discussion through the media it produces. Moreover, through its way of showing things, art establishes a connection with its audience. In this context Krien Clevis describes the role of art within such discourses as mediation, whereby art does not merely serve as a vehicle for ideas or concerns; art also serves to constitute, displace, recreate, change, or translate them. From this perspective, as well as on the basis of the artist’s autonomous mode of thinking, art may in fact reveal different or alternative scientific perspectives and reflect them back on its audience, users, clients, etc. In their research, artists capitalize on the synergy between their own artistic practice, the various relevant research concerns, and the unique interactions involved—while also pursuing reflection on these aspects. This is where artistic research comes in. Clevis’s contribution is one of a non-musician. As a visual artist and researcher, with a PhD in the arts, she specializes in images and their meaning when researching a specific place. Looking back on her dissertation project, she shares her views on the meaning of artistic research. Starting with her visual work, she begins with the end in order to end with a beginning, or with some rather particular indefinite end, if such exists at all. Artistic research goes further than that. Before discussing the role of artistic and historical “sightlines” in her work, she briefly lingers on its autobiographical sightline.

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Lasse-Marc Riek—Walking into Sound (sonic thought i) Lasse-Marc Riek’s essay is an auditive work about natural and mediatized listening in the landscape. In the spring of 2010 he started to trace the landscape with his ears and his entire body to develop a grasp for sound through his own experience. For three days he hiked and listened for 40 kilometers through the hilly landscape along Rio Paiva in Portugal, with limited food supplies, sparse equipment, and growing ears. He wrote about succinct, unspectactular, rare, and familiar sounds. This is how this readable listening-diary came into being. Sabine Breitsameter—Soundscape as a System and an Auditory Gestalt Based on an enigmatic quote by German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), Sabine Breitsameter’s paper frames both intellectually and aesthetically the conceptual substructure of the term soundscape, as coined and published by the Canadian pedagogue, sound researcher and composer R. Murray Schafer. Relating the term soundscape to Gombrich, Heidegger, McLuhan, and Weizenbaum, it emerges as a figure of thought, a mindset, allowing a certain intellectual approach, and an auditory Gestalt, allowing to perceive and listen in a special, maybe new way. By this, the term’s deeper dimensions are carved out, thus expanding its scope from a “green” environmental approach to an existential way of being and an inevitable pre-requisite of sound thinking. Angus Carlyle—Memories of Memories of Memories of Memories: Remembering and Recording on The Silent Mountain This essay found its catalyst in the Picentini mountain range, in the hinterland behind Naples and Salerno. Angus Carlyle had been invited to a residency program by the arts organization Fondazione Aurelio Petroni and contributed to an exhibition there entitled Viso Come Territorio (The Face As Territory). Traveling to southern Italy and returning home over a period of five months sharpened previous experiences of field recording, particularly in terms of the complex

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relations between that sound arts strategy and the operations of memory. Carlyle proposes an approach that is inspired by addressing the acoustical functions of sound as themselves “memorial”—in the sense that sounds remember their origins in a prior release of mechanical energy and recall the propagation path through which they have traveled. From that initial impetus, he goes on to consider recording technologies and techniques as active participants in the character of sound rather than the transparent, blank forms of registration they might otherwise be assumed to be. He attempts to open up the practice of field recording to processes of listening, remembering and composing which are not staged in linear, chronological fashion, but which fold back in on each other in iterative cycles. The cyclical nature of these processes suggests the need to reconfigure our definition of the field as a discrete, distant territory; instead, field and home might be connected in a shifting, partial, and contingent morphology. The essay is populated by short first-person texts. These texts perform two tasks: they engage with Wittgenstein’s fragment on memory from Zettel and adapt his formula to think through memory-sound, memory-words, and recordings; and they are mechanisms through which the “remainder” might intrude (a remainder that is made up of everything from the field that the recorder cannot capture). Carlyle finishes by projecting an account of two dimensions in field recording practice: the first internal, connected to the solitary listening and remembering recordist; the second, external, opening out to those others who share the expanded field of environmental sound. Thomas Köner—Thaumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and Non-Thinking (sonic thought ii) In his “Thaumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and Non-Thinking” composer and audiovisual artist Thomas Köner explains a practice of artistic creation that is based on the tension of place (topos) against the variety of resonances that arise around it. He understands composition as a continuum, where a score can be understood as map that charts degrees of vibrational awareness.

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Heiner Goebbels—The Sounds of Things (sonic thought iii) In his essay Heiner Goebbels rethinks the meaning of “The Sound of Things” in his compositions and theater works of the last thirty-five years. From manipulated bell sounds in his first tape compositions, the rhythmic repetition of breaking windows in a sound collage, the looped sound of high heels walking on a Boston sideway, to the inspiration drawn from the sound of a writing hand or an espresso pot, Goebbels describes how things and their sounds have conquered more and more space in his works. They impose their own rhythms and dynamics; their presence influences words, movements, actions; they call for respect and in the most intriguing moments they break the logic and the sovereignty of the human performers. By letting the things and their sounds become more than just illustrations, but rather protagonists, Goebbels turns traditional hierarchies upside down and ultimately avoids an anthropomorphic center and identification. Christoph Cox—Sonic Thought What would it mean to think sonically rather than merely to think about sound? How can sound alter or inflect philosophy? What concepts and forms of thought can sound itself generate? These are the questions Christoph Cox addresses in this essay. His aim is to track some of the ways that philosophy has or could be inflected by sound in order to produce not a philosophy of sound or music but a sonic philosophy. Sonic philosophy begins not from music as a set of cultural objects but from the deeper experience of sound as flux, event, and effect. Bernd Herzogenrath—in|human rhythms In many ways, the twentieth century can be regarded as art’s attempts to escape the “tyranny of meter” (the phrase is Robert Schumann’s). In his essay, Bernd Herzogenrath asks the question if there is a way to think rhythm otherwise? Maybe the answer to this all-too-human tyranny of the repetition of the same is something inhuman—in|human rhythms. With the examples of works by John Luther Adams, David Dunn, and

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Richard Reed Parry, this essay tries to show how with the idea of the human becoming a geological (i.e., non-human) force itself, art has the responsibility to create an awareness of how we live not only in the world, but also as part of that world. A music that “performs” these “cosmic dimensions” of the interdependence of human and nonhuman, by focusing on the in|human of the concept “human” might also teach us something in regard to artistic (or musical) form—these rhythmic “relations of velocity” ultimately reveal rhythm as the in|human nonlinear pulsation of “a life.” Jessie Beyer and Jason Wallin—Sound Without Organs: Inhuman Refrains and the Speculative Potential of a Cosmos-Without-Us For its modelization in grade school textbooks, enhanced telescopic imaging via Hubble, and through Hollywood science fiction settings, the cosmos has passed into recognizability. Such familiarity might be said to occur by dint of what Thacker (2011) refers to as anthropic subversion, or rather, the territorialization of reality from a distinctly human-centric point of view. Where the drives of modernism aspire to the Earth’s refashioning “for-us,” this essay aims to consider the ways in which anthropic subversion now extends beyond the “blue ruin” that is modernism’s horrific outcome. From the generalized re-imaging of space as the new frontier for mining, to the anticipated colonization of Mars, the alien abyss of space becomes submitted to the will of human life. Yet for the various ways in which the cosmos has been habituated to human sensibilities and rendered as a backdrop to our aesthetic preferences and desires, this essay speculates on a series of electromagnetic recordings of cosmic objects obtained by the probes Rosetta and Voyager that invert or subtract a particular teleology linked to anthropocentric thought. Deep space interactions of electromagnetic particles, solar winds, and planetary magnetosphere received by NASA probes Voyager, INJUN 1, ISEE 1, and HAWKEYE have been translated to reveal a diversity of inhuman soundscapes.

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It is along this trajectory that Wallin and Beyer borrow from Murphy and Smith’s (2001) Deleuzian inflected provocation “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” for speculative ends. That is, by rejoining thought to such alien compositions as that of Comet 67P, we might become capable of relaunching sound along strange non-philosophical vectors in support of both new problems and horizons for thought. Christoph Lischka—Buzzing off . . . Toward Sonic Thinking For quite some time now there is growing evidence both in the so-called Cultural Studies as well as in the Sciences that the existing positivist conceptual frameworks fail in particular areas—they turn out as inadequate or even incoherent with respect to the existing empirical data. A prominent example in the Sciences is Quantum Gravity where heavily established concepts like “space” and “time,” “objectivity,” “determinism,” etc., are put into question; and for many researchers in the “Cultural Studies” it feels strange to discuss topics as “affect,” “emotions,” or “sound” and “voice” under a semiotic regime. In his essay Christoph Lischka focuses on the concept of Sonic Thinking, and will try to understand how existing ontological narratives eventually turn out to be inappropriate for an adequate investigation of sonic experience. As an alternative, he outlines a research strategy oriented at a process-based narrative, drawing on endeavors in fields as diverse as mathematics, logic, computer science, quantum gravity, and philosophy. Eventually he reaches a point of convergence where we get the conceptual apparatus to construct an “ontology” suitably not to think on sound, but rather to think sound—Sonic Thinking. Jakob Ullmann—Sound Beyond Nature/Sound Beyond Culture, or: Why is the Prague Golem Mute? Jakob Ullmann’s essay asks—in a more philosophical sense—about the nature of sound on the background of a situation where listeners cannot escape sound and sounds. On the one hand sound is used—in present as in past—for the good and for the evil, sound has in this respect no

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protection against (mis-)use. On the other hand sound, especially because it does not represent anything except itself, cannot become domesticated without a rest of chaotic, of strange, wild, even awful primordial powers. The combination with the Greek LOGOS is one (a partial) answer to the question. It is combined with mythological knowledge, a message of nowhere, but a message from time in which the order of the world was not yet disturbed by the order of man. The early Christians decided to reject “music” to save the WORD. But this rejection could not prevent that a new sonic art came back from mouths, pipes, and strings. A Jewish author of the thirteenth century tried to combine the series of notes called “melody,” to which this new sonic art changed what formerly was “sound,” with the letter complexes of creation which are ceaselessly configured by such “melody.” A symbol of this art of Abraham Aboulafia is the figure of the GOLEM . But the GOLEM is mute. The magic text of its creation is sound, but the result of this procedure was not allowed to create an audible resonance in the creation. Again and again sound stays a question of life and death, even today; there sound is a nearly valueless coin of every-day experience as composers from Europe of the last century can testify. Mark Fell—One Dimensional Music Without Context or Meaning As a practising artist working with what he calls time-constitutive processes, Mark Fell has an interest in different descriptions of time and temporal experience and how these relate to musical structures and experiences. His essay draws from recent anthropological research and current philosophical perspectives in order to critique Husserl’s use of musical metaphors in his account of time-experience. It attempts to show how Husserl’s position is grounded in a culturally specific analysis that is both sustained by and embedded within his beliefs about music, focusing on Husserl’s analogy between temporality and spatial perspective, and attempts to apply critiques of spatial perspective to Husserlian temporality. Finally, music production softwares are discussed. Fell argues that these can be compared to different modes of

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temporal experience, showing how these both sustain and construct specific temporal paradigms in response to which creative practice is structured. Holger Schulze—How to Think Sonically? On the Generativity of the Flesh This essay investigates four major methodological, epistemological and ontological issues currently at stake in the rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary research field of sound studies. As research on sound seeks more and more disciplinary definitions and methodological trajectories Holger Schulze asks a troubling question concerning the overall concept of this field: How to think sonically? This question is investigated by the four connected questions: How to think spatially? How to think corporeally? How to think beyond logocentrism? How to think imaginatively? In sound studies, Schulze argues, various efforts to transform epistemological approaches in cultural theories come together. Therefore the impact of neighboring concepts and approaches is scrutinized in this essay as well as being put into context to use for research in sound studies. The author discusses major concepts such as the auditory dispositif, a possible ontology of vibration or radical empiricism as well as approaches such as the sociology of spaces, body theory, or aural architecture; he proposes to sound studies scholars to explore the more particular research aspects of proprioceptivity, experientiality, and generaticity as well as a method like writing a sonic fiction. Achim Szepanski—Immanent Non-Musicology: Deleuze|Guattari vs. Laruelle Achim Szepanski’s essay explores the position of Deleuze|Guattari and Laruelle regarding their concepts on aesthetics and especially of music, which contain two special forms of non-representationalism. Deleuze|Guattari and Laruelle agree that representational aesthetics has come to an end, but they do not agree on what form immanence should take in aesthetics. While Deleuze|Guattari prefer the productive

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capacity of matter, Laruelle insists on the immanent and generic logic of the Real/One. Laruelle would reject Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of music as the capture of affects and percepts (including relationship between material and forces) and would instead postulate to music an autonomous theoretical order, a non-scientific thought according to the radical immanence of the real—the real, here, understood as foreclosed and indifferent, without mirroring aesthetics or knowledge or being mirrored by science. Non-musicology goes from the real to the transcendental, then to the occasion of music. Sonic thought or non-musicology composes theory as its own object and therefore delivers a kind of echo to the work of the musicians, to their way of the becoming-of-music. Laruelle starts to write a new music-fiction. Julia Meier—Sonic Figure: The Sound of The Black Soft In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari show how a work of art can come into being, how creative processes can take place, and how this is related to the human body without representing it, but presenting it as a becoming-other that has manifested a bloc of sensations of dehumanized “affects and percepts” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 312–13). In order to describe the parameters that are necessary to create music or art, they mainly refer to the biological theses of Jakob von Uexküll, and present their concepts of “territory” and “refrain,” which they have abstracted from geographically associated sonic motifs of birds. In order to reflect on artistic processes that are capable of creating a new sound which has become something that is no longer recognizable and thus has the capability to affect us profoundly—an own distinctive style—Julia Meier examines the music of the New York-based duo The Black Soft who succeed in breaking and destroying well known musical patterns in order to be able to get rid of their cliché functions and thus to create a kind of abstract sound or form where the cliché has been identified, but then has been “deterritorialized,” which renders sonorous forces

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that are not sonorous. What becomes sonorous then in The Black Soft’s compositions, is the spasmodic, convulsive rhythm of what could be characterized as a “hystericized” body. The listener gets viscerally affected and dragged into this convulsing sound body, thus “becoming” it him/herself. Adam Harper—Images of Thought | Images of Music A century after Luigi Russolo’s futurist manifesto “The Art of Noises” and following a distrust of such demands, Adam Harper was asked to write a new musical manifesto, and he chose as its one main assumption the direct equation of music with thought. Like the thinking that resists Deleuze’s Image of Thought, music must resist the presuppositions of an Image of Music. Chief among them are definitions of music’s relationship to sound he critiques as “sonocentric.” Music, rather, should be considered as a medium of differences not necessarily privileging or determined by sound(s). It is culturally and psychologically mediated as multiple “images of music,” however, and music that transcends these images can be regarded as “modernist,” and is a vital way of reflecting the emergent subjectivities and collectivities of modernity. Aden Evens—Digital Sound, Thought “Digital Sound, Thought” asks what, if anything, is distinctive about sound recorded and reproduced using digital technologies. Framing the analysis around the insistence that sound—based in motion and heard only in duration—carries with it its past and future, the bulk of this essay offers an extended examination of the digital, to see what befalls the essential motion of sound when it is captured as a static sequence of numbers. The topology of the digital pushes in two opposed directions, both flattening all digital content into a plane of equivocation and reaching toward its own outside to discover a significance always lacking in the digital itself. These two poles of digital operation are both modes of abstraction, which is the digital’s chief technique, and both poles find their model in the bit, which is the principal technology

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of the digital. The bit also lends to the digital its possibilistic character: every bit gets its meaning in part because it might have had the other value; every 0 could have been a 1 and vice versa. Combinatoric possibility in the digital substitutes for the open-ended potential of non-digital objects, with important implications for the nature of sound in digital culture. Sebastian Scherer—Sonotypes (sonic thought iv) In his experimental essay|performance|composition “Sonotypes” Sebastian Scherer explores various incarnations of his own thought process during the production of text and sound. By referencing various scientific and artistic methods of sonification and by taking “sound thinking” literally he translates his thoughts into sound by exchanging the computer keyboard with a musical keyboard and a sequencer program. This self-reflexive modus operandi makes the thought process audible and suggests alternative ways of generating, perceiving, and comprehending thought and sound.

Notes 1 My translation of: “Alors je dirais que le concept philosophique n’est pas seulement source d’opinion quelconque, il est source de transmission très particulière, ou entre un concept philosophique, une ligne picturale, un bloc sonore musical, s’établissent des correspondances, des correspondances très très curieuses, que à mon avis il ne faut même pas théoriser, que je préférerais appeler l’affectif en général. . . . Là c’est des moments privilégiés.” Gilles Deleuze, “Image Mouvement Image Temps.” Cours Vincennes—St Denis : le plan—02/11/1983. www.webdeleuze.com/ php/texte.php?cle=69&groupe=Image%20Mouvement%20Image%20 Temps&langue=1 (accessed February 10, 2011) 2 See also Thoreau’s essay “Walking” and his|its concept of “wildness”— “sound” can be read as “wildness” with regard to “music” (as sound organized by a traditional composer)—the unformed, unintended,

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untamed in comparison to John Sullivan Dwight’s canonization in Thoreau’s time of European Classical Music (and in particular the compositions of Beethoven) as the paradigm for a future American Music.

Works cited Cox, C. (2003), “How Do You Make Music a Body without Organs? Gilles Deleuze and Experimental Electronica.” Available online: http://faculty. hampshire.edu/ccox/Cox-Soundcultures.pdf (accessed September 15, 2015). Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Jonas, H. (1954) “The Nobility of Sight,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14(4) (June): 507–19. Klein, J. (2010), “What is Artistic Research?” Available online: http://www. researchcatalogue.net/view/15292/15293 (accessed September 15, 2015). Murphy, T. S. and Smith, D. W. (2001), “What I Hear is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop”, ECHO: A Music-Centred Journal, 3 (1). Available online: http://www.echo.ucla.edu /Volume3-Issue1/smithmurphy/ (accessed June 2, 2015). Nietzsche, F. (2009), Writings from the Early Notebooks, R. Geuss and A. Nehamas (eds), trans. L. Löb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Noë, A. (2009), Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. Rilke, R. M. (2001), “Primal Sound” in D. Rothenberg and M. Ulvaeus (eds), The Book of Music and Nature. An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 21–4. Rilke, R. M. (2007), Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke. Vol. II: 1912–26, trans. G. J. Bannard. Leiserson Press.

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Thacker, E. (2011), In The Dust Of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. UK: Zero Books. Thoreau, H. D. (1962), The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, B. Torrey and F. H. Allen (eds). In fourteen volumes (bound as two). New York: Dover Publications. Thoreau, H. D. (1973), The Illustrated Walden, J. L. Shanley (ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thoreau, H. D. (1998), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Varèse, E. and C. Wen-chung (1966), “The Liberation of Sound”, Perspectives of New Music, 5(1) (Autumn—Winter): 11–19.

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Time|Place|Memory: Artistic Research as a Form of Thinking-Through-Media Krien Clevis

Autobiographical sightline: Time-sound-memory My earliest memory goes back to my second year, to 1962 and a nineteenth-century town house in Blerick/Venlo, close to the Dutch/ German border. This memory, if it is a real one indeed, is not linked to some image but to sound: I am a busy toddler, leaning on the edge of my playpen. I remember this because I heard music on the radio: Maria Callas, Madame Butterfly (as I would learn years later). This was also the first time, as I remember now, that I had to cry, moved by the beauty I heard. Sometime later on (about a year or so, a long time in a child’s experience), I cherished that memory and whenever I wanted to listen to the radio I would go and sit in the intimate space of my playpen. The Top 40 was my favourite show, and for a long time it would really bother me when some song no longer made it to the list. Trying to cheer me up, my mother would tell me that there also were evergreens, but that didn’t convince me, for it meant you had to wait until some deejay would play your favorite evergreen on the radio, implying you were completely dependent on his whims. In the early 1970s my parents became fervent collectors of Alle 13 goed, a series of albums with top favorites, and this allowed me to play my best loved songs any time ad nauseam. Still, I realized that something quite different was going on as well. I had become aware of the notion of fleetingness, transitoriness. Things could simply be over, never to return again. I would be eagerly looking forward to an anniversary or 23

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some outing, but when the day arrived I was also quite sad, because I realized that soon it would be over again. If time made it possible for things to take place, because of the passing of time things would also be gone again in a flash, vanishing into the past. I began to record specific moments in stories and I started drawing—to capture some of the moments soon to be lost. This new awareness in me, fuelled by a single song or sound fragment, proved defining for the rest of my life and, through its documentation, also for my artistry. The “Proust phenomenon,” the power of smells to trigger early memories, is well known of course.1 Although my abovementioned memory was evoked not by a smell but by a sound, classical music in particular, the effect has basically been the same.2 In my case it pertained to a feeling of sorrow that not until much later was I able to link to the notion of the passing nature of all things. This is important to me because it touches on what in essence a memory embodies: that which is not there anymore. I remember, and therefore I am. To me this understanding implies a desire to organize and cultivate some memory—reconstructing it, as well as shaping it and showing it. Our autobiographical memory exists as thoughts, on paper, and in images, and it is invoked by images, smells, or sounds. The autobiographical “sightline” emerges here as an all-decisive factor in the things I created (artistic) and studied (historical). It allowed me to design a life of my own, whereby the autobiographical realm functions less as a straightforward “explanatory” factor than as a catalyst of memory (Kruithof 1995). For example, my photo work Et in Arcadia Ego is an attempt to map memories (or the realization of things passing) in a new way (see Figure 2.1).

Artistic research: Thinking-through-making I grew up with images. My father was an architect, my mother was multi-creative. As a child I would sit at my father’s drawing table

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Figure 2.1 Et in Arcadia Ego (2010–2012). Duratrans Light Box, frame: old bed shelves, 130 × 160 × 25 cm.

and make sketches of the people who were going to live in the houses he designed. Had I been raised in another family, I might perhaps have developed other talents. From an early age, I wanted to become an artist. Although I did not have one particular art discipline in mind, I was fascinated by images and in particular by their content, which also determines their form. This is where the initial starting point can be situated: why do I want to create certain images, what is it that I want to express, and what does it mean or represent? Artistic research is a specific mode of research of and in the domain of art from the perspective of the arts. This may apply to all arts (fine art, composing music, performative art). It implies research by artists of their own work, which is realized in the questions they ask in relation to particular concerns in (the development of) their work. Unlike in

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strictly scholarly research, these concerns come into being in part by doing, trying, developing, making. In this context, making involves such various mental activities as thinking, analysis, study, understanding, reflection and scrutiny. This process of making, including the problems that present themselves as the work evolves, gives rise to critical reflection, which in turn provides the basis for further research, also in other contexts (cultural, historical, scientific, and so on). Human beings are capable of three creative modes of action in particular: visualizing, complementing and symbolizing. Visualizing, in the sense of man who builds what he has seen—to understand nature—and who subsequently tries to express it (where nature suggests unlimited space, man will build a fence); complementing, in the sense of adding something that is missing; and symbolizing, as the main step that expresses the mode of man-made action, namely the power to translate, transform something into a new product, medium or place. The Norwegian architect Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000) thus characterized the basic principle of creating or making: as a process that takes place in order to appropriate a place and the transposition that comes about between idea and imagination or translation in a tangible object (1980). In the research of artists the process of making coincides with the process of thinking:3 making = knowing → reflecting → artistic research.

Performativity through materiality Sound, smell and image are all autonomous sensory entities, they are tangible and have autobiographical power; they all appeal to our sense of memory. Tangibility, tactility, grabbing, touching, feeling, smelling, tasting, hearing also apply to materiality, the material with which we create art (in whatever form). Artistic research is thinking through the material, determining its language, and what it represents; but also: what does the material do, and what does it bring about? The material represents and is performative at the same time.

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The performative/performatory/performativity is defined as an expression or mode of expressing which not only describes or represents an act in language, but also causes something or sets something in motion.4 A text does not just have a meaning, but it also does something, is itself an enactment. Performance as method starts not from a given reality which precedes a personal experience, but from the world that is being enacted, performed or from the situation in which freely and actively a new world or reality is performed. In the performing or visual arts, a performance is a physical presentation within a seemingly familiar context in which acts occur which may completely surprise the spectator. In such instance, the performance or act refers to generating a world, creating something new. No two performances are identical, in fact they are always unique and they will also be experienced as such because each spectator is unique as well. The performative implies a fluid world in which subjects and objects do not yet exist, have not yet materialized, but in which they are in a state of ongoing change or transformation—one which is unstable and hard to repeat (Salter 2002). The performative makes and realizes the world at the very moment it is called up (by the reader, user, spectator, the audience). Through my photo works I intend not only to represent a place, but also to generate a world (see Figure 2.2). Basically, a photo invites the observer to look while simultaneously directing his or her gaze. The image itself (the sightlines within the work), the way of showing (the frame, the installation in the space: sightlines on the work) functions as a device which can be operated by the observer, who thus also gives meaning to the work. The interaction or “cross-traffic”—the meeting of making and receiving—takes place where representing and performing, the game of creating, converge and can be experienced by the spectator—at the point where art and space coincide, as in a dialog from which both interlocutors benefit. Artistic research makes material arguments. Art can create a world by using specific materials. A place is transformed into a new place by using the power of the imagination. Artistic research involves a form of thinking through matter (including the various disciplines,

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Figure 2.2 Bewaarplaats / Storage 4 (2012–2015). Duratrans Light Box, frame: aluminium Z-profile with open supporting structure, 126 × 162 × 26 cm.

media, and methods), but the material itself may activate the spectator as well.

Artistic sightline: Photo works and place A transposition occurs from idea to image, or to sound, etc. This transformation is important in the process of realizing my work. I complement and symbolize places; I record and render visible. I select some existing place to which I seek to add a new dimension; I disconnect or disengage a place from its everyday environment, giving it a new context. In making, building, acting, the place is transformed and all its physical elements and atmospheric qualities resonate in the artwork. By fencing-in a place, it becomes isolated from its environment and takes

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on a symbolic function. From a social-historical perspective I look at and comment on a place and by photographing it I appropriate it, making it visible in its new context. The transformation process determines the expressiveness of the ultimate image. The artistic “I” may refer to the “maker” in various guises: artist, composer, performer, and so on. Artistic research is about that transformation; in fact, the creative process—the work’s materialization—is the embodiment of the research.5 All art essentially seeks to appropriate a place in the transformation process and elevate it, so that it becomes a new, “autonomous” place. In this respect, the process of making a photograph involves an ethnographical process of observation: selecting the right moment, the right time of day and of year, the right day, the moment itself, leaving room for chance, serendipity. This also means knowing a place through and through, appropriating it and trying to grasp its spirit. The places I research are historical, concrete (in the actual world) or imaginary (from my memory). They are all local—if within a larger global context—and many of them are lieux perdus, places of meaning no longer present as such in the real world. Being subject to ongoing changes, these places are marked new layers of construction, temporal and spatial aspects, which are being overwritten all the time. If they did not yet figure as places of meaning, they become so by being photographed—I (re)create them also as maker. My mode of research centers on three dimensions of places in particular: historical, artistic, and autobiographical. They determine the three similarly named sightlines in my work. All these places can be traced in time (the present making contact with both past and future). Moreover, they also have in common that they revealed themselves to me: as given places, they are on my mental map, daily in Amsterdam, staying in Rome, or when I travel. As such I literally run into them as part of everyday activities, when jogging or taking a walk, which automatically involves exploring and repeating the same routes (see Figure 2.3). I have grown familiar with them and made them my own. At one point, they simply will reveal themselves to me. Next, it is up to the spectator to do

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Figure 2.3 Plaats S103 / Place S103 (2009–2015). Duratrans Light Box, frame: pinewood covered with cigar boxes, and sprinkled with essential oils of Cedrus Atlantica, 130 × 166 × 22 cm.

something with these places. A major element thereby is that also spectators should manage to appropriate the new place by means of the photo: ideally, the power of their imagination should trigger all sorts of associations.

Historical sightlines: Genius loci To get to the “bottom” of a place (historical, concrete, imaginary), I studied the genius loci, the spirit of place, which in antiquity referred to the protective spirit of some area or location.6 This originally Roman concept emphasized the characteristic nature or atmosphere of a certain location or the impression it left. It involved a metaphorical quality

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rather than a strictly defined one, a quality which becomes manifest in a suggestive or associative manner. By making a photo of a place I try to activate its spirit again—as a form of intervention in that place. The places to be photographed have a certain, given quality, but there is also a dimension that you can play with or influence by making the photo. In this respect I consider the camera I use as an external eye that enhances the observation, an element which at times becomes visible on the actual photo only. It is not impossible, however, to catch the genius loci. It is hidden in layers of time and space, but can barely be seen, if at all. At the same time, it may be experienced. The genius loci is bound by place. A place changes because its surroundings or contexts change across time and space. This is not to say, however, that the genius loci is a given, unchangeable. A place’s spirit is determined by all the people who in one way or another ever used that particular place. Every event or occurrence takes place, leaving traces behind which will in part define that place. In my photoworks, I look for ways to activate that genius loci and to incorporate the locations to be photographed into a new meaningful place. Just as such location becomes isolated from its surroundings (in nearly all cases the image has no sounds, for instance), the photo of that place is literally and figuratively cut from raw reality, liberated from its existing context and thus itself becoming a new place. In the series Bewaarplaats / Storage I tried almost literally to “catch” the genius loci of a contemporary (construction) site in Amsterdam, which through recent digging activities became directly linked to an age-old history (see Figures  2.4 and 2.5). The underground location, part of a new subway line, reveals—much like in a time capsule—how a place in its very core, through excavation of the soil and subsequent construction, is changed and overwritten. The process of digging, the victory over forces of nature, the quest for the lowest point made possible by the construction—all are major beacons for the changing history of a meaningful place which becomes a new one by recording it on a photo. The individual associations this image may subsequently evoke among spectators add a third layer of meaning.

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Figure 2.4 Bewaarplaats / Storage 2 (2011-2015). Duratrans Light Box, frame: aluminium Z-profile with open supporting structure, 144 × 126 × 26 cm.

In my photoworks I try to represent that intangibility hidden in processes. But in contradiction to what the use of language suggests, when recording, fixing some moment in a photograph, the genius loci will always escape us. My photos thematize the quality of place in an affective manner. It is about a place’s non-taken-for-grantedness—its sightlines, terrestrial radiation, pits and traces, and so on. It is about “triggering” that specific, not always visible quality of a particular place and therein lies what the photos do/bring about. With my photos I try

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Figure 2.5 Bewaarplaats / Storage 3 (2011–2012). Duratrans Light Box, frame: aluminium Z-profile with open supporting structure, 126 × 162 × 26 cm.

to appeal to the audience’s affective, empathic and associative powers and to activate the atmospheric quality of a particular place. This sets in motion and actualizes the genius loci.

Sound Is it possible to grasp sound? Does a genius loci exist of/in sound? Where do we encounter the genius loci of sound, and if we find it, does it reflect the emergence of a new place? If we cannot catch this spirit in an image, can we do so in a sound? Deep down in the Amsterdam underground, at 23 meters below the surface, precisely halfway into a bored tunnel connecting two subway stops, I found the sound of nothing/nothingness, a soft distant noise, like the echo of a cloud. It was ephemeral yet tied to this particular place; it grew more dim when

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doing two steps forwards or backwards, while it also became increasingly mixed with the sounds of the outside world, the faint noises coming from the future platforms of the metro station. It underscored how changeability and the noises tied to a place come together.

Transformation The changeability of the genius loci is crucial for my research. The quality of a new place lies in its transformation. The original genius loci which can still be felt changes because the context changes. This merely renders the newly emerged situation, which has incorporated the old one, richer, adding a new layer of meaning to the whole. This is essential to my search for the final place, which for the time being cannot be localized. In the new places I create as an artist I try to offer spectators possibilities for opening up new layers—of memory, history, the genius loci of the site. The new places are expressions of my historical research and link up historical places with new, incorporated places. They are sites of transition, constantly subject to change, the final stop or destination being unknown. The permanent movement in fact reflects the mystery of the genius loci. Photos ought to be seen, but also felt (Barthes 1980).7 To me, they are sanctuaries, temporary storage places of indefinable residues or relics. Places of transition are productive because they change all the time. Layers of time and space from divergent historical periods may briefly coincide in a momentary “here and now.” This permanent dynamic suggests a connection with the concept of intertextuality, referring to the notion that every text is built from a mosaic of existing texts. Intertextuality suggests a fluid system, in which each text is in dialogue with other texts, and, more broadly, with the cultural context at large.8 Yet there is more to it. Different, unlike images are connected to each other, reflect on and influence each other. Histories, places, and media enter in a dialogue with each other, generating echoes which resonate in new times and places.

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Crossroads on the sightlines: From photo to house, from place to memory The findings of my exploration of the historical research initially served as foundation of my work, as a solid footing. Next, in the context of my dissertation, it evolved and resulted in a new place, an installation in the shape of a house, based on a classical layout, overwritten by modern means, yet indebted to a long tradition. In my installation Familiehuis/ Halte-2 (which initially was going to be built underground in Amsterdam), the three sightlines I discussed (historical, artistic, and autobiographical) converge. However, the house I wanted to build never left my studio and was prematurely overwritten, as it were, by time and spatial problems. It turned out, in other words, that the underground house could not be realized due to planning problems in the subway line’s construction. The “reality” or physical experience of my underground house vanished before it even materialized. Yet what remains—what always remains— is the imagination, the drawing table of the mind. The impossibility of building a real house actually extended my central concern of performativity: how to show my photoworks in another performative manner? Fellini’s Roma was my great example. Subway builders discover a hole in the wall in the subway shaft of Line B in Rome, which after countless problems were solved and it in fact opened in 1955. Behind it sits a Roman house, however; after the unsuspecting research team descended into the hole bored, they used their large searchlights to reveal the treasures of the Casa Romana. Until one of them (“Michele, Michele, guarda che succede!”) notices that all frescos seem to vanish just like that. Indeed, the freshly discovered house suddenly disappears into nothingness again, as if it never existed. Briefly, the atrium house is unearthed from the dust of 2000 years, but it vanishes forever again right at the moment when it comes into contact with the present-day era. If anything, Fellini’s movie transports us back to the power of the imagination. A new layer of meaning presents itself simply through the power of imaginative creating and showing.

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Having lost the opportunity of building a physical place, I turned to “virtual reality” instead. I decided to build the house in different media, serving as model for the new performative way of showing. The spectators were first of all invited to enter the house and they could thereby choose various different approaches: the book (a reflection on the house), the scale model, the 3D-animation, the app or the film: all the media in which this house was represented and the place—or recollection of it—was created). In my installation, material experience and virtual discovery existed side by side as equals, but at the same time they overwrote each other through time and place. Every spectator could have his own experience of the house, thus adding a new layer in (its) history. The house was “performed” in alternative ways by relying on different media. The spectator determined how and to what extent he related to the artwork. Art is a great mediator of course, and it performs its responsibility in this respect through all these various media. Art mediates via all these various media. Accordingly, artistic research is a form of thinking-through-media. Having to respond to the new situation of not being able to build my installation in the subway shaft, I became more aware of the artist’s twofold task: how to imagine some particular work and how to show it in a relevant/adequate way, so that it earns a place of its own in the audience’s perception. This also pertains to appealing to the different audiences that a work may generate (by means of different manifestations/media). By deploying media such as film, 3D-animation and app, it became possible to overwrite, so to speak, the “real” underground house in a reversed experience of time. A film was made of what might have been, rather than of what was. Virtual performativity or material experience— both overwrite the temporal and spatial limitations of the installation, the disrupted place becomes a site of memory. In bringing together these various media, it became possible to reach different audiences contributing to the work. If we all have our own, private world of memory, taken together these overwrite each other and become part of a more collective one. Places of meaning never exist as static givens;

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they take on new meanings by being overwritten, and this involves an ongoing process. In the end it is irrelevant, from an artistic angle, whether or not the house is real at all.9

The eternal and the continuum Is it possible for us to hold on to what is bound to pass? Can we isolate or “fix” time and space? Do we have the power to touch the ephemeral and retain it, if only momentarily? By “digging” in collective classical history and tapping my personal recollections, I found fertile soil in which my fascination for place, transience, and transition could take root. My photo works involve photos in context which tell a story about a place. If in my performative house project the house served as accommodation of the photo works, in my current work the Duratrans Light Boxes themselves serve as artistic accommodation, each work having its own individual encasing. As such each box is like a ‘house’ telling its own story, a temporary museum for the image, captured in a photo. It turns my photo works into objects. Historical, current, or imaginary places, all shrouded—“placed”—in a context of their own. The new house operates performatively: it gives visitors a red-carpet welcome by pulling them into the image, sprinkled with scent, climatecontrol, and sound. The sightlines on the work are enhanced by performative media, mutually influencing each other from the essence of the image in equal measure. The method of artistic research works by thinking-through-media, underpinning the genius loci, no matter how imaginary or ephemeral (see Figure 2.6). Disciplines may become interdisciplinary and media may become interchangeable, and as such they all contribute to what constitutes our personal motivation. In artistic research I am concerned in particular with thinking-through-media. This involves a process which cannot be analyzed from the outside by others; rather, it can only be transformed, reflected on, played with and felt from within by the

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Figure 2.6 Hall overview Empire of lights, exhibition of Duratrans Light Boxes in Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam (May–June 2015): www.krienclevis.com.

maker. Subsequently, the work may find its way to the audience, which should ask what it brings about, rather than passively wondering what it means, as a way to generate active involvement. Artistic research is the trajectory the artwork has covered based on questions, studies and reflections, in order eventually to occupy a new place of its own, which in turn needs to be interrogated. This dynamic involves a continuum, and as such it embodies the very heart of research.

Notes 1 This phenomenon has been linked to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, in which he describes how his eating of a “Madeleine” as an adult reminds him of the happy moments in his childhood. 2 Already in the late nineteenth century studies were done of people’s earliest memories (such as by Victor and Catherine Henry in 1896 and F.W. Colegrove in 1899). These studies revealed that early memories are

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nearly always described in visual terms, rather than in terms of smells or sounds. See also the chapter on “Flitsen in het duister: eerste herinneringen” in Draaisma, 2001. Norberg-Schulz, in Genius Loci, refers to Heidegger’s theory of poiēsis, which goes back to Greek antiquity. The notion of technē is linked directly to making. See also Wesseling, 2007. The British linguist and language philosopher John L. Austin was concerned with the relationship between “saying” and “doing” in language, thus providing the basis of contemporary debates on performativity. See also the introduction of Salter, 2002. Or as Henk Borgdorff puts it: “For the opposition between theory and practice as soon we learn to understand the dynamic of the emergent field as a chain of transformations, . . . interactions, and articulations that may ultimately produce more reality” (Borgdorff 2012). The genius loci refers to the atmospheric quality of a place whose meaning is rarely obvious right away. Indefinable by nature, the genius loci frequently determines a place’s feel and character. For more on this, see Norberg-Schulz, 1980, in particular the preface and Chapter I. The original title is La Chambre claire (Paris: Gallimard 1980). See in particular Chapter 2 on the notions of studium and punctum. The concept of intertextuality was launched by Julia Kristeva (1941) in 1969. She claimed that every text is intertextual in the sense that every text is built from a mosaic of existing texts. Rather than being an autonomous object or closed system, a text is always linked to other texts and, more broadly, the cultural context at large. For Kristeva, the text is a crossroads of all sorts of possible ideological (social, political, literary) systems which an author integrates in his text, be it consciously or not. These systems, then, are not so much tied to the author, but function autonomously. For the movie The Once and Future House (2013), in which the sound of the bore tunnels is processed, see: http://youtu.be/8VVwfZl_lUk

Works cited Barthes, R. (1980), Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. Borgdorff, H. (2012), The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press.

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Draaisma, D. (2001), Waarom het leven sneller gaat als je ouder wordt. Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij. Kruithof, J. (1995), Gezicht op Proust. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980), Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. London: Academy Editions. Salter, C. (2002), Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge MA : MIT Press. Wesseling, J. (2007), “Kunst als poiēsis”, in K. Zijlmans, R. Zwijnenberg and K. Clevis (eds) Co-ops. Interterritoriale verkenningen in kunst and wetenschap / Exploring new territories in art and science. Amsterdam: De Buitenkant.

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Walking into Sound Lasse-Marc Riek

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Sonic Thinking 27.4.2010 11:45 granja (1) 11:55 stop came across a fisherman cross the inflow, shoes off! hear the paiva in front of me it runs directly into me an engine top left, birds straight ahead getting my feet dry, ants all over me 12:10 walking on 13:45 stop a well, inflowing the sound increases, decreases then stepping into a room of sound noises pour in slowly well is sounding stronger on the left right hand a field of crickets unfurls walking the curve well down left well further down right crickets rear left crickets top right 13:48 an airplane afar crossing diagonally from left hand side to rear right, front right sonic swells up birds top right landscape slowly

Walking into Sound signal echoes from above 14:00 fagosa (2) tractors far and near a rooster calls from up front dogs barking loudly people talking cars rattle and roll cuckoos far away, they’re many afar, kids playing football 15:20 castro daire (3) roads are small it’s noisy, noisier than before it’s acoustically hazardous on the streets all the cars, trucks and busses you need your ears to cross the street safely in town, the connection to the river the wells from the hills run into the river 15:36 onward (to the) river means gush flush, like getting lost in a rush the white noise covers everything concentration depletes alongside the rocks the noisy river 17:50 ermida (4) i do not see i listen a rustling a chirr villages increasing engine noises chats

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Sonic Thinking radio cacophonic tractors, rattling, thunder afar small cars kinda hissing close, honking a dog yowls, barks goats communicate conversations separate 19:45 near ribas (5) setting up the tent hillside children’s duett valleyside a skylark in the centre a river a lentic drone, white noise crickets rustling silence bats hiking inside sound permanent movement increasing attention swelling up ebbing down suddenly stagnant 21:00 airplanes, very high above

28.4.2010 5:50 getting up cricket concert birds singing

Walking into Sound 6:00 chimes a dog nearby the tent, closely cuckoo, bright and clear oscine birds kidding a rooster signalizing airplane noises afar the river permanently clusters forming up 7:00 chimes of the surrounding churches 8:00 ribas (5) a vintage mountain village early dwellers on the roads silence dogs barking silence a moped, humming silence 8:40 pinhero (6) having a rest at the church some cars the river behind me oscine birds, inflow, river straight through my body this moment is sound 10:50 villa nova (7) field green fragrance work heat

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Sonic Thinking oscine birds rustling in the eucalyptus a senora with goats i ask: “where is the path?” walking going strolling resting 18:00 ester (8) uphill wind a swishing in the broom downhill through the dry eucalyptus stroking uphill a swishing in the heather wind downhill setting up my tent right at the river hills to the left and to the right noises all around acoustically blind 19:00 a boar inside the tent i fall asleep dazed

29.4.2010 7:00 getting up eat, listen

Walking into Sound flow, listen stroking stones 8:00 onward backward uphill a swishing in the heather downhill through the dry eucalyptus stroking uphill a swishing in the broom downhill 10:00 airplane, very high above uphill road engines downhill the river rushes downhill the river rushes the river gurgles cows jingle dogs bark across the bridge 11:50 nodar (9) the river rushes

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−1 granja 11:45, 27.4.2010 −2 fagosa −3 castro daire −4 ermida −5 ribas 19:45, 28.4.2010 −6 pinhero −7 villa nova −8 ester 19:00, 29.4.2010 −9 nodar

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Notes A listening diary about a three-day listeningwalk (approx. 40 km) at the bank of the “Paiva” River around Nodar, Portugal. Six apples, three bananas, a bottle with water, pencil, paper for notes, digicam for photos, tent, clothes and a few printouts of a topographic map from the region. The Paiva River, 112 km (from Carapito in Moimenta da Beira to Castelo de Paiva). The listeningwalk was part of work I did during an Artist in Residence Project in 2010 which was called “Paivascapes” organized by Binauralmedia in Nodar. Thanks to Daniel Schiller, Stefan Militzer and Luis Costa.

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Soundscape as a System and an Auditory Gestalt Sabine Breitsameter

Viel hat von Morgen an, Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander, Erfahren der Mensch; bald sind wir aber Gesang. Much from tomorrow on since we exist as conversation, listening to each other have human beings undergone; but soon shall we be song. Friedrich Hölderlin (1958: 148) “[S]eit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander . . .”/“. . . since we exist as conversation, listening to each other. . . .” This is the line of a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, a German poet from the beginning of the nineteenth century, who is famous for his highly philosophical verses. While it may seem unusual to start an analysis of Acoustic Ecology and soundscape with Hölderlin, this perplexing verse both intellectually and aesthetically frames the conceptual substructure of the principles of soundscape, a term coined by the Canadian pedagogue, sound researcher, and composer R. Murray Schafer (1969). Hölderlin’s words richly reflect the factual and contentual surface of acoustic ecology, which explores environment as a conceptual approach or mindset, allowing sound to be considered beyond ostensible thematic ascriptions to offer occasions for what I term formative listening1 (Breitsameter 2011). The topos of conversation, to which Hölderlin enigmatically refers, serves here as an initial inspiration and catalyst. 51

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Schafer’s terms soundscape and acoustic ecology In 1977, the Canadian composer, pedagogue, and sound researcher R. Murray Schafer published his most influential book, The Tuning of the World (Schafer 1977), in which he coined two innovative terms: soundscape and acoustic ecology. According to Schafer, a soundscape is the sonic envelope which surrounds a listener in a certain place or space. It includes all sounds—even small and distant ones creating consciousness for those sounds that are usually ignored. Schafer once explained his term thus: “To see the landscape with the ears.”2 This means the geographical, biological, social, religious, and cultural conditions of an environment contribute to a soundscape, which can be considered the sonic representation of living material and immaterial presences in a certain space or place. Schafer’s term acoustic ecology addresses the sonic interdependencies between living beings and their environments. It became prevalent in the discourse that followed Schafer’s main publication, referring to the influences between environmental conditions and sonic occurrences, especially events and developments with harmful consequences for the sonic environment of a certain place or space. The pollution of air and water, for example, result in a quieter forest environment, which often leads to vegetation loss and, thus, to an even quieter forest. In another example, a high noise level in a pub results in louder and louder conversations. This affects not only the quality of communication but also health, for example causing a sore throat from talking too loudly, or hearing loss issues. The consequences of pollution are considered typical topics for acoustic ecology, as they include physical damage, communication difficulties, and loss of sonic diversity and auditory quality in general. Schafer criticizes urban soundscapes, which he considers dominated by the constant hum of air conditioners, the rattling of construction machines, and non-stop motor sounds. For him, they manifest industrial society’s fundamental values: efficiency, mobility, and consumption, leading to a dense sound mix resulting in impenetrable sound walls,

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which Schafer calls lo-fi, an experience which makes specific, quiet, and distant sounds difficult to distinguish. These sounds of everyday life have become, according to Schafer, waste products of certain immutable functions, and are prioritized against health, individual and social well-being, autonomy of perception, and aesthetic pleasure (Schafer 1977: 3–11). As successful communication and unpolluted natural resources came to be considered as lower-ranking values, acoustic ecology gained a political dimension. “Soundscapes provide information on an environment’s natural and social consistency, and allow to draw inferences about its priorities, deficits and power structures” (Schafer in Breitsameter 1994: 8). It is no coincidence that the late 1980s brought Schafer’s ideas of acoustic ecology to a larger and international audience, especially in Europe, as the broadening of the ecological political movement took place at this time. The public response to Schafer’s thoughts focused mainly on aspects of environmental pollution. As he exemplified many of his ideas based on describing ancient or rural soundscapes, and the disappearance of natural sounds in favor of urban or technological sounds, it has become popular to locate the ecological core of acoustic ecology in Schafer’s assumed idealization of “nature.” Many of his proponents and companions added to this image. From this, however, stems an abridged and misleading understanding of acoustic ecology, as “romantic,” technophobic, and aesthetically normative, which inhibited—especially in Germany—the academic discussion of it.3 Underneath this layer of superficial interpretation, we will become aware of a different concept of acoustic ecology and to the quite essential way of sound thinking which it allows.

Soundscape as a field approach A soundscape is not a monolithic entity but a plurality characterized by diverse elements, which are the sounds and the mechanisms of its

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origins. In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) McLuhan explains that it is not the medium’s content which conveys communication, but the medium as such understood as a “field.” All elements of this field exert mutual influence on each other, so this field forms an open system that transforms, adapts and incorporates everything that it gets in touch with. McLuhan calls this also a “mosaic approach” (McLuhan 1962: before p. 1). His focus is not on partial aspects of the medium, but he understands it as an entity of configuration and dynamic relationships.4 It is this “instant total awareness” (ibid.) which suspends sequentiality and linearity, making such a “field” approach plausible. The Schafer soundscape model is similar. It turns away from a selective attitude of hearing (listening to a certain content or signal, and ignoring others, or qualifying them as “noise”), but seeks to foster an evenly applied attention to all sounds simultaneously. This “mosaic approach”—the attention to “all sounds at once”— emphasizes the auditory with respect to the visual, as it liberates it from its routine filtering and ignoring, and expands it. Its auditory experience is like the one of a polyphonic structure in a musical piece, where independent elements merge to an entirety. The utilitarian perceptual habits of everyday life are closely interrelated—as Schafer describes throughout his book—with the predominance of the visual culture, and—as McLuhan made aware and Schafer implicitly confirms—its cultivation of distancing, sequentiality, and linearity. Thus, the mosaic approach is a prerequisite to enabling an ear-centered perceptual concept and attitude.

Soundscape and environmental Gestalt The term environment took on significance in aesthetic discourse when McLuhan identified it as a crucial concept.5 It is deeply interrelated with his mosaic approach. Consequentially, environments are not “passive containers,” but “active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike” (McLuhan 1962: 7), including existing phenomena

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and society’s tools and practices, constantly reconfiguring them in the very moment, as well as throughout history, transforming recipients to effective elements and involving those as the environment’s active parts. Such an environmental Gestalt is pluralistic and dynamic, contrary to the notion of a homogenous object with well-defined contours. From here it is only a small step to the notion of soundscape. In 1967, before the term soundscape became popular, McLuhan stated clearly, “The ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships” (McLuhan and Fiore 1967: 110). To distinguish it from the frontal, selective, or ignorant listening habit of everyday life, this awareness of simultaneity calls for recognizing the process of listening as a formative activity,6 which requires the listener’s endeavor in order to take place, shifting between different listening attitudes—generally between analytical and selective ones, as well as synthesizing and integral ones. Polyphonic music requires the same diversification and fluctuating of perceptual attitudes. It is the prototype of formative listening as it generates different shapes and auditory configurations, depending on the method of listening. This kind of formative listening represents a listening methodology. It upvalues the auditory in general, because it acknowledges that listening is not—as often declared—a mere instinct and emotion-based perception, but a practice of systematically as well as habitually applied attitudes and concepts, of engaging and disengaging, focusing and de-focusing, of selecting and merging, etc.7 The same applies for soundscape listening. As a set of approaches, it is a methodology of auditory appropriation. In this respect, the concept of soundscape is a figure-of-thought that reformulates auditory experience as practiced and experienced in virtually all situations. It shifts the time-based notion of sound to a spatial notion, without denying its time factor. An agitated, interactive, and participatory “all-in-one” and “all-atonce”, this is the environmental Gestalt McLuhan imagined and Schafer achieved. The awareness created by this environmental concept transgresses the borders of a mere cognitive model toward processual and aesthetic being, and paves the way for what McLuhan called the

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idea of “environment as artwork,” “designed to maximize perception” (McLuhan and Fiore 1967: 68). This alludes to Schafer’s soundscape as an aesthetic concept of everyday life, whose manifestations can be improved by supporting and carefully balancing its worthiness of being listened to.

Ecology and its substructure Schafer’s acoustic ecology draws listener, sound, and environment together into a dynamic setting, in which changes in one factor influence all the others, in the end affecting the auditory manifestation itself (Truax 2001: 12). This includes the concept that environmental changes and pollution affect the quantity of noise and the aesthetic quality of a soundscape. It closely relates to the use of the term ecology in describing a state of neglect and damage of natural resources, and mirrors a concept of ecology that served as the starting point for environmental activism. However, by reading through Schafer’s The Tuning of the World, one does not get the impression that Schafer is talking about such an activist position. In 1977, the political connotation of the term ecology was less marked. Much more pronounced and in line with the debates of the time was Schafer’s anti-capitalist rhetoric. The question, then, becomes where is his ecological substrate situated? It is again McLuhan who leads us into a clarifiying and deepening understanding of ecology, which allows us to understand the complete extent of Schafer’s ecological substructure. Although McLuhan rarely used the term ecology, it emerged as one of his central ideas in relation to the mediated senses, describing an overall pattern of his thinking.8 His endeavor to understand media as environments was fed by his claim that society should regain control over them, which he considered “a matter of survival” (McLuhan 1969). (Here we have an allusion to Darwinist terminology—survival in the sense of being able to master electronic media’s impacts on psyche and intellect,

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and regain the individual’s freedom of wishing, acting and perceiving.) “We shape our tools, and then the tools shape us” (McLuhan 1964: xxi) is a famous and critical quote and underscores McLuhan’s ecological idea. It is based on his central thought that each sense or faculty that is extended technologically or stimulated excessively, “leads to the ‘closure’ or equilibrium-seeking among the other senses” (McLuhan 1964: 45), and to Narcissus Narcosis, the denial of the audiletactile by a society that became addicted to images9 and despises that which is audible. The ecological notion that some of McLuhan’s successors carved out of his writings is not a biological one, dealing with natural resources, pollution, and sustainability, but a structural one that applies the term ecology in a systemic sense, identifying the factors of an environment and investigating their mutual influences, interdependencies, dynamic relationships, and configurations. A societal system is, according to McLuhan, the result of interdependencies between technology, order of the senses, and specific values and practices. According to McLuhan, one of the enormous impacts of these media systems is the shaping of perception. We find the same structure of argumentation in acoustic ecology. Throughout his book The Tuning of the World, Schafer describes the historical development of soundscapes and the factors that changed them. By exploring historically the cultures that favor or discourage the auditory sense, he came to the conclusion that sensory perception is marked by societal conditions, especially a society’s core values. Noises that represent them are sacrosanct, and are prioritized against values such as health, stress reduction, wellbeing, and beauty. Ugly and tedious sounds gain ground. In this context it becomes difficult to develop a relationship to auditory phenomena in everyday life, media, and art. Thus, the auditory sense shifts into the background and the impression arises that the sonic world generally lacks importance. One could paraphrase and adapt a McLuhan quote and apply it to Schafer: “If we understand the revolutionary influences on the faculty of listening caused by technologies and media, we can free ourselves

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from them, instead of accepting the resulting perceptual reductions as given facts” (McLuhan 1969).

Aspects of participation and interaction In general, let us acknowledge here that if we talk about sound and soundscape we are talking about dynamic relationships, about correlating and interactive elements, and about agile configurations. In short, we are talking about living systems. Allow me to remind you of the first lines of my paper, the verses from Hoelderlin: “[S]ince we exist as conversation, listening to each other. . .”. This is similar. If we talk about conversation as derivative from soundscape, we talk about an environment based on a range of quite different listening methodologies in order to access plurality, complexity, and enhance communication. Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza,10 the famous programmed, artificial conversation from 1966, showed that if the control exerted on a partner in a system is too strict, if the rules are to formalistic and too narrow and leave no space for improvisation and surprises, the interaction gets stuck at some point, and shows its limits. Eliza is—as Weizenbaum conceded—an ironic example of this. Translating Eliza into the world of sound and imagining it as a conversation—as a specific soundscape— implies that creating meaningful interaction requires understanding. There is no understanding without listening—no meaningful contribution to the system’s action without listening. Even in this twosided process of auditory communication it is not the linear, sequential, controlling approach that promises a meaningful process, but, on a small scale, the field approach between dynamic, interdependent elements—in this case two dialogue partners. “The individual listener within a soundscape is not engaged in a passive type of . . . reception, but rather is part of a dynamic system of information exchange,” confirms Barry Truax (2001: 11). He was the one who brought Schafer’s implicit assumption to the surface, of

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soundscape being a participatory or interactive process and a dynamic entity based on three basic constituents: listener, sound, and environment (Truax 2001: 12). As described by Truax, these elements are linked in a constant process of readjusting to each other, continuously shifting their mutual relationships. Having enlightened this animated liaison, we must concede that the triangular model, however, provides only a quite general mechanic, as it says nothing about the quality of the environment or the sound, the intention of the listener and his cause for being in this environment, and what he wants to do there. “Instead of thinking of sound as coming from the environment to the listener and perhaps being generated back again, we will think of it as mediating or creating relationships between listener and environment” (Truax 2001: 12). With sound here being only a by-product, the question arises as to why and how this should take place—and how it can take place successfully. As applied to acoustic ecology, the main question is how to bring a soundscape’s major factors into mutual influence and interaction, such that the result is simultaneously informative, communicative, socially stabilizing, free from violence against individuals and minorities, and—last but not least—aesthetically pleasing. What is necessary is a frame in which the elements of the mosaic or the field can get involved with each other, in order to create something meaningful and authentic. The conditions of control and openness have to be balanced. Such a prototypical framework was developed by the so-called ars sermonis, the art of conversing, which was practiced in the time of Aristotle around 350 BC . It sought to establish a sustainable and lasting communication, not as a ritual, but as a simultaneously cognitive and socially meaningful interaction. It avoids being specious and quick in results, and relies mainly on the process itself. Ars sermonis, as explained by cultural historian Claudia Schmölders in the following, is not about pathos (the type of discourse that calls for action and decision) but about ethos (the demonstration of integrity, respect, and credibility). It is neither about mere information, nor about passionate persuasion, but about delight, bringing into accordance, and

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keeping the communication going (Schmölders 1979: 11–14). Ars sermonis seeks to fulfill three central virtues: affabilitas: affability, as intermediate between flattery and dissent; veracitas: veracity or sincerity, as intermediate between irony and grandiloquence, between lure and persuasion; urbanitas: serenity, as intermediate between scurrility and boredom (Schmölders 1979: 12). This is Ars sermonis’ flexible framework, which keeps communication flowing and within its participants can act reciprocally. All this is based on the actors, their environment, and their engagement in listening and speaking. In this system of clear, but flexible rules, there is room for improvised dialogue, which provides freedom, but also delineates the path to create meaning. Its elementary guidelines to keep communication flowing can be applied as an ideal model for conceptualizing, designing, changing and improving a soundscape in a city or in a busy building. All elements of a soundscape, constructed for everyday life, all mechanisms which emanate sounds, should be reassessed if they would fit and respond to the central values of Ars sermonis.

Coda Much from tomorrow on since we exist as conversation, listening to each other have human beings undergone; but soon shall we be song.

The poem talks about a common “we,” a multitude of minds, which identifies itself as a medium of communication: the medium of conversation. This medium is based on common rules of participation and interaction: listening, sense-making, understanding and soundmaking, i.e., practicing a dynamic relationship based on listening and active sound production. The system of conversation assigns roles and behaviors, creates perceptual structures, coins values, forms social

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organizations and political systems, and can thus be considered an environment—an ecosystem according to ecology’s substructure mentioned earlier. “[S]ince we exist as conversation, listening to each other. . .” From the beginning, the quote from Friedrich Hölderlin sought to echo this essay’s wider context: understanding the terms environment, soundscape, and acoustic ecology as closely related systemic concepts based on paradigms not conforming to linear-causal approaches and inherited dialectical cognition. The philosophical traces of these “all around” concepts lead to Martin Heidegger’s concept of “In-Sein” (“being in” or “being inside” a system or an environment), which implies that a separation is not possible between a human being and the sphere in which he/she exists. Heidegger argues that the individual or the society amalgamates with its surroundings, such that object and subject— perceiving and creating the phenomena to be perceived—are inseparable (Heidegger 1953: 130). In the end, this is an existential concept: being a listening part of the auditory world as well as an auditory part of the listening world. This mindset is most probably the central pre-requisite for a sonic thinking.

Notes 1 In German: gestaltendes Hören (the act of listening as an act of giving shape to the audible), cf. Breitsameter 2011. This act is described in Breitsameter (2007: 64–74). 2 While conversing with his radio producer Klaus Schöning live on air on the occasion of the premiere of his radio art piece A Winter Diary on WDR 3 Studio Akustische Kunst, 17 April 1998. 3 A separate lecture would be necessary to identify the distorted characterizations that have been used to brush off acoustic ecology, namely in musicology. However, the acoustic ecology is currently appreciated as a cultural practice by media (especially middle European cultural radio), and by pedagogy.

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4 According to E. H. Gombrich this field approach is rooted in Cubism at the beginning of the twentieth century. “[C]ubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradiction or dramatic conflict of patterns, lights, textures, . . . drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole,” cf. McLuhan (1962: 25). Original: Gombrich (1959: 238). 5 Referring to media, their technologies and their context. 6 In the sense of the earlier mentioned gestaltendes Hören. 7 The US -American composer Pauline Oliveros for example teaches with her Deep Listening methodology a diverse array of ways of listening. For visual perception such methodologies have been reflected and discussed intensely throughout cultural history. 8 Because of this, McLuhan is considered the godfather of media ecology, an approach to media theory sharpened by scholars like Neil Postman, Lance Strate, and Christine Nyström. 9 Narcissus unaware that it is his own. 10 Available online: http://www.med-ai.com/models/eliza.html.de (accessed June 1, 2015).

Works cited Breitsameter, S. (1994), Soundscapes – Klanglandschaften. Streifzüge durch den Dschungel der Akustischen Ökologie. Baden-Baden: Südwestfunk. Breitsameter, S. (2007), “Radiokunst innerhalb und ausserhalb der Schule”, in V. Frederking, H. Jonas, P. Josting, and J. Wermke (eds), Medien im Deutschunterricht 2007 (Jahrbuch). Themen-Schwerpunkt Hörästhetik – Hörerziehung. München: kopaed. Breitsameter, S. (2011), Gestaltendes Hören – Erscheinungsformen, Wahrnehmungsweisen und Funktionen von Klang. München: Hans Seidel-Stiftung. Gombrich, E. H. (1959), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heidegger, M. (1953), Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer-Verlag. Hölderlin, F. (1958), “Hymnen (1800–1804), Friedensfeier”, in F. Beissner (ed.), Friedrich Hölderlin: Sämtliche Werke. Kleine Stuttgarter Ausgabe, 6 Bände, Band 3. Stuttgart: Cotta. Also available online: http://www.zeno.org/

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Literatur/M/Hölderlin,+Friedrich/Gedichte/Gedichte+18001804/%5BHymnen%5D/Friedensfeier (accessed June 1, 2015). McLuhan, H. M. (1962), The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McLuhan, H. M. (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Toronto: McGraw-Hill. McLuhan, H. M. and Q. Fiore (1967), The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam Books Inc. McLuhan, H. M. (1969), “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy Magazine (March 1969). Schafer, R. M. (1969), The New Soundscape. Scarborough: Barandol Music Ltd. Schafer, R. M. (1977), The Tuning of the World. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd. Schmölders, C. (1979), Die Kunst des Gesprächs. Texte zur Geschichte der europäischen Konversationstheorie. München: dtv. Truax, B. (2001), Acoustic Communication. Westport: Ablex Publishing.

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Memories of Memories of Memories of Memories: Remembering and Recording on the Silent Mountain Angus Carlyle

I’m not sure that the memory isn’t more reliable when it has no external aids to fall back on. Seneca 2004: Letter 87 Memory: “I see us still, sitting at that table”. But have I really the same visual image—or one of those that I had then? Do I also certainly see the table and my friend from the same point of view as then, and so not see myself?—My memory-image is not evidence for that past situation, like a photograph which was taken then and convinces me now that this was how things were then. The memory-image and the memory-words stand on the same level. Wittgenstein 2007: 650 What follows was written after a period reflecting on my experiences of one particular project of mine, reflections that drew me towards the claim that all sound is memory. In these pages I will introduce something of the project. I will also explain what is meant by my claim that all sound is memory and I will explore what I think are some of the implications released by that claim. Exploring how those implications pulsate outwards from the initial claim will involve: a recalibration of the relationships between listening, recording, remembering and composing; a reconsideration of the sustainability of the aligned notions of recording as blank registration and of the recordist as bland disembodiment; a 65

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recognition that the convention of the field needs disruption (at the very least, the convention of the field that gets articulated in field recording practice and discourse); and a speculation that these implications find themselves bifurcating between an internal and an external dimension, the internal dimension attaching to the solitary practitioner, the external one reaching out in its connections to others. All sound is memory. The sun—that lent us its last rays to cast the trees in bronze and rust— fell towards the horizon. The path was laid with grey fragments of stone, the biggest the size of biscuits and the smallest only a little larger than dust. The weight of our feet set the stones in motion, grinding some together, sending others skittering down the slope. The grating footfalls were by far the loudest sound; when we stopped, it took a breath or two for our footsteps to finally disappear. An evening blackbird and at last I heard our totem name: Silent Mountain. Sound is memory in that whatever is audible can only ever be a repetition of an event that has already occurred. Sound finds its prior origins in a release of mechanical energy whose force creates that pulse that is shaped by the twin vectors of compression (where molecules are squeezed together) and rarefaction (where molecules are pulled apart). This pulse is the soundwave with its peaks and troughs; as the energy that we call sound leaves the starting blocks, it races away at three hundred and forty meters a second. If atmospheric pressure, temperature, and humidity are each consistent, it will travel at the same speed whether the source is the rubber sole of my boot dislodging one of those gray chips of rock and its destination is my hairy ears some two meters above or whether the source is the eruption of Krakatoa that sent a chain of vibrating molecules extending from the volcano all five million meters to Mauritius. Beams reveal the area that we clung to in last year’s darkness as a short, low-ceilinged ledge jutting out over a massive cavern. Fine mist

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steams rolling from our lips and nostrils through the torch-light. Sliding down the slopes, passing equipment between us (I waver between vertigo and claustrophobia). Water drips from the cave roof far above into glossy bowls hollowed from the rock, loose chips like dregs. The LED strips cast shadows from a large marbley protrusion in the centre of the cavern that guards the descent to the next level. This is: the mountain within the mountain. Sound is memory, too, in its capacity to recall the characteristics of the world it has traveled through. In the cave, each splash remembers the size of the water droplet, the height that it has fallen and retains an acoustic sense of the dimensions of the pool that it has struck. But the sound of the splashes that arrives at our ears—along with a cold spray of moisture—has now also accrued the colors lent by echoes off the rim of the bowl eroded into the stalagmite’s peak. Sound’s potential to preserve the shape of its originary mechanical cause and to hold onto the details of its path of propagation—how it was reflected by the edges of smooth limestone and how it reverberated off the rougher walls of the grotta, how a portion of its morphology got absorbed and how other qualities might be masked by the roar of the subterranean river further into the mountain’s lower depths—is an enduring matter of memory. This conception of sound as vibration was first popularized in the nineteenth century by John Tyndall whose “lectures and books had a profound effect on the knowledge of the subject of sound among English-speaking people, and on the teaching of acoustics during and after his lifetime” (Beyer 1999: 70). Tyndall’s lectures were delivered through pedagogic technologies of explanation, laboratory demonstration, and illustrative examples, the latter involving boys pushing each other, cannons, Alpenhorn, fog, munitions exploding, and jumping from cliffs. Tara Rodgers’s compelling interpretation of Tyndall “shows how audio-technical representations are condensations of worlds in which social differences have been produced and naturalized as neutral, physical properties of sound” where the disturbances of

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soundwaves are feminized just as their agitation and investigation is conversely registered as masculine (Rogers 2010: 80). If, for me, vibrations lead to memory, for others they lead elsewhere. For Steve Goodman in Sonic Warfare, for example, the trajectory twists once towards acoustic weapons that deploy sound pressure against bodies and buildings and twists again into affect: “[f]rom vibes to vibrations, this is a definition that traverses mind and body, subject and object, the living and the nonliving. One way or another, it is vibration, after all, that connects every separate entity in the cosmos, organic or inorganic” (Goodman 2010: xiv). Smoke curled into the morning air. The smell of burning wood was one of my first sense-impressions of San Cipriano Picentino, a smell that still hung there when I returned two weeks later, a smell of heat against the cold, a smell of food being cooked to warm the belly, a smell of the land in flames, the special tang of the local trees being used as fuel. And in the palazzo, the fire in the wide hearth blazed through the irregularly shaped logs (more like roots). Lucia stooping to grasp a smouldering branch and reposition it to her satisfaction. The mountains that comprise the Picentini range in the hinterland behind Naples in southern Italy each possess their distinct qualities— their beauties—but each, in their own way, represent a threshold which sound’s inherent homeopathy struggles to breach. Here sound’s memories—of origin and of path—become muted. Hence the totemic name for what began in early 2012 as a residency, became an exhibition and continues today as an unfolding project involving the creation of field signals, a flag, an album of stories and compositions, and a film that is a collaboration with the filmmaker Chiara Caterina: Silent Mountain.1 That name was initially born of an instrumentalist frustration that these special “high places” offered so little to my ears and to my microphones. The emblematic expression Silent Mountain has since evolved for me into a productive acknowledgment of the limits of the technological apparatus of capture and the phenomenological capacities of the

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reminiscing agent, limits that are thrown into relief by the light shed by what I am proposing is sound’s inherently memorial function. Headlights swayed as the car rolled down the slope, manoeuvring between the potholes and boulders. I waved and began to climb through the rain. Reaching a squat plateau some 400 metres below the summit, I unshoulder my dripping backpack and crawl through the stunted trees towards the edge. The wind gusts and buffets, drags tears from the corners of my eyes, rattles my cagoule’s hood, groans branches and flickers sodden leaves, offering itself as sound but also dragging scraps from the village below the lip of the cliff: a squashed dog bark, a stretched snatch of birdsong, a distended bell. Working in the field to record the transmission of mechanical energy through air molecules as sound, I come to a special appreciation of that energy’s vulnerability to being disrupted, to losing its memories (whether of origin or path) whenever the wind starts to rise. Moreover, through the artificial mechanisms of the microphone, you are allowed auditory access to the prevalence of micro-turbulence, so slight as to be otherwise imperceptible, and begin to appreciate wind—as gust and as breath—as an often-unacknowledged participant in sensory experience. As sunlight hits the earth, it converts solar energy into heat in a ratio that depends on the directness of the beam of light. At the poles, which are struck in a more oblique fashion, there is less heat produced and as a consequence they are colder than at the equator where light impact is more direct and the temperatures rise accordingly. The temperature disparities fuel the vast complexity which earth scientists call the “global heat engine.” This engine cranks out its power through two major systems—the global wind field and the great ocean currents. These two systems propel the earth’s weather through its cycles, cycles that are shaped in relation, tempo, and meter—in rhythm—by more local features in the Picentini mountain range. So the sound of wind ultimately carries with it its own memories— even as it conspires to render other soundwaves forgetful of theirs. The

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memories of wind are reminders of the distant operations of the mammoth gear systems of the global heat engine and the souvenirs of the effects of local terrain and the temperature, pressure, and humidity gradients that it structures. High up on the silent mountains, it is the wind that usually dominates. The swirling of the swollen streams fell away; trees thinned and birdsong became sporadic. The others left me sitting on my coat connecting cables in a high mountain pasture. With no wind in the sky, time passed almost without external sound. Twice the soft snarl of a far-off chainsaw and once a jet tearing at the sky. Leaving the clearing I found the panorama at the rocky outcrop empty. Descending the summit on the faintest of tracks I got lost and then got disorientated. Fear lodged deeper with each stumble and deeper with each thorn snag until I heard voices. At this local level, wind can arm itself against the field-recordist as an enemy. When it raises itself up in a violent assail, gathering its forces to pummel and swirl, venturing outside with the microphone running becomes a fraught experience. Sounds that would otherwise hold a sonic identity long enough to be captured in some fidelity are stretched and torn; even the most sophisticated windshield, further barricaded by its fluffy fabric, remains susceptible to the rumbling attack of wind noise. On other occasions, this enemy creeps up on the unwary recordist who has decided to make a sortie unguarded by a windshield, the apparent calm suddenly disrupted by a wind that comes from nowhere (often, it seems, at the very point that a delicate acoustic scene is working its way out before our ears). And yet, wind can also defect, turning sides and becoming the recordist’s ally. Wind sets things into motion on the mountains, starts new chains of mechanical energy, making them sound, offering opportunities for other kinds of memories: flurries on the surface of the deep pool near where we found the wolf tracks; the strumming of wire fences on the steep cliff down to the cave; the garlands of wet snow

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brushed from the drooping holly; the dried chestnut leaves blown down the stone path above Vignale. In a way, sound is wind (as it is memory). If wind is the movement of air across the earth, then sound—at least airborne sound—is the movement of energy transferred between vibrating molecules through that air. In the Oasi wildlife refuge, amongst the streams of acqua bianca, there is a tall waterfall; as the water cascades down over the limestone cliff, it is difficult, crouching down, to determine what it is that is sheeting over me in harsh waves: water, wind or sound? The sounds we hear rarely reach this level of perceptible currents of air but, below the threshold of our skin’s sensitivity, we are being blown on all the time. Tim Ingold has put his finger up to feel the currents of the wind as part of his wider rendition of life lived not in isolation on a closed surface but through an immersion in “the incessant movements of wind and weather, in a zone wherein substances and medium are brought together in the constitution of beings that, by way of their activity, participate in stitching textures of the land” (Ingold 2011: 121). Accounts of the immersive power of wind at the turbulent end of the meteorological scale are given muscular construction in Chris Watson’s “Low Pressure” (1996)—where the limits of recording technology are rendered graphically audible at the track’s culmination—and in Francisco López’s Wind [Patagonia] (2007). Cathy Lane’s “Gaoth (Wind)” (2014) does not shelter itself away from more ferocious squalls and the presence of these is made felt, intermittently flapping the fabric of the composition into vigorous motion. Yet those gusts find themselves breezing in and out of other winds, ones that range across a graduated spectrum of force and frequency, that are enemy and ally. Moreover, in the creation of the recordings, in their arrangement and in their manipulation, Lane eschews addressing the wind in its alterity alone. We hear microphone wind noise unadorned and unaltered but we are also made to hear, through the percussive rattle of fence and gate, the thrum of turbine blade, the whistling between glass and brick, that the winds are imbricated in our lives, in our gathering of energy, in water for our thirst or our crops, in the design of our dwellings, in our

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management of livestock, and in the dunes that shelter us from the seas. Reading the writing that accompanies The Hebrides Suite, we become sensitive to the participation in Lane’s compositions of her own memories of over two decades on the islands and of the memories “collected in interview and conversation as well as oral history material from national and local archives.” The jeep stops below the treeline and we climb down. The early evening’s rain drips from pine branches and heat leaves the engine in “pings”, “pinks” and “tings”. The soles of our six shoes crush the stones on the trail, bend the wet grass stalks. The swinging bunch of keys still seems to ring. The headlights’ glare leaves our eyes and the dark starts to fade; tongue tastes of sour wine. Along the slope my ears find owls faintly calling; I cannot bring them into the headphones I have pulled on. Something has disturbed a crow from its night roost. If sound summons up the detonation of force at its source and recalls the properties bequeathed by its propagation path, the mechanical devices we employ to reproduce those recollections each remember things in their own ways (buried in the etymological strata beneath our word “record” is the Latin recordari; literally as “restore to heart” and figuratively more at “call to mind” or “remember”). To risk a tautology, the operations of mediatization in the context of visual recording are visible. Optical media devices materially register themselves in grain, stock, color balance, and shutter speed. These discernible textures are now deployed as markers of historicity, clues pursued in forensic analysis as much as opportunities to embed a flashback sequence within a purported chronology: the hair-in-the-gate jitter of black and white, the sundrenched saturation of Super 8, the mottled glare of VHS , the strangely muted tones and never-black-blacks of Hi-8, the shifts from blocks to bends within the evolving spectrum of digital moving image. For acoustic media, the registration gets resolved on the auditory plane, with successive recording technologies simultaneously imprinting their distinct circuitries as channels, frequency ranges, and compression

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artifacts while also bestowing whichever media substrate is involved with its own identifiable relationship to loss and decay. The microphone wind noise that has already been remarked upon is another instance where the ostensible transparency of media devices—their supposedly silent operation—clouds over into sonic presence. In the late 1990s, a plug-in for the Wavelab software was developed (whose name I have since forgotten) that enabled users to manipulate a graphic representation of a rotary knob in order to dial up the distinctive pops, crackles, wobble and flutter associated with particular eras of vinyl playback (throwing a virtual switch alternated the simulated presence of AC or DC current). This plug-in, and successors that followed it, constitute aural analogues to the ubiquitous processing in retinal media practices, where even the instant Hier und Jetzt mobile phone snap is liable to be filtered through a lens that articulates “60s,” “70s” or “80s.”2 The oblong head of a goat leads its body towards the house. The goat was surrounded by others, some young, some much older, some more shaggy, some more energetic; together the goats managed to occupy the full spectrum of the palette that interior decorators would call “off white.” A sheepdog hunched its shoulders above its back as it slunk along beside the herd, ears alert to the calls of the shepherd with a black sports cap and long forked walking stick. Around the necks of the goats, flat-ended bells hung from leather straps that were dulled and softened by use. If recording devices each offer their own perceptible powers of retention, the files that are encoded into their digital memories also constitute, in projects like Silent Mountain, aides-mémoires that get stowed in the baggage hold on the flight home and then unpacked on my kitchen table when I pull my headphones on and start to compose. In parallel, perhaps, to the anthropologist’s field notes, to the architect’s site drawings or the Sunday painter’s sketches, the sounds that the apparatus of capture has retained on its recordings—sounds that themselves carry

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reminiscences of originary force and of propagation path—“remind me to remind me” of my experiences in southern Italy. It is in this sense that my frustrations with the shortcomings of my own compositions— castigating myself by contrasting them with those of Watson, López and Lane—may ultimately be redeemed. My shame at my recordings lack of amplitude or clarity or presence and the muddiness of their composition might be assuaged through a comparison with Michael Taussig’s understanding that “the fieldwork diary is built upon a sense of failure—a foreboding sense that the writing is always inadequate to the experience it records. Nevertheless, on rereading by its author, the diary has the potential to bring forth a shadow text that can simulate the experience that gave birth to the diary entry, not only for what is said, but more likely for what is omitted yet exists in gestures between the words. This is what Barthes called the ‘role of the Phantom, of the Shadow’ ” (Taussig 2011: 100). I am conscious that the specifics of the compositional approach I tend to adopt—one that primarily deploys the selection and assembly of fragments of field recordings into layers rather than the alternative strategy of leaving those recordings intact, allowing them to unfold as they are into the world of the heard—amplifies the role of recordings for me as mnemotechnologies.3 When I am working on Silent Mountain in my headphones at the kitchen table to create a track for a CD or soundtrack for a film, I am working with circularity: listening to my recordings as prompts to trigger memories of being in the field while simultaneously using those very recordings—now cut into fragments and overlapped—to construct something of a facsimile of that memory. To adapt the terms that Wittgenstein offered in one of the two epigraphs to this essay, the lexical commentary in my head that describes what I can recall of the appearance of the goats at 5 o’clock in the afternoon on February 19, 2012 are my “memory-words.” The sound-shaped residues of the keening shepherd’s cries, the hiss of the school bus’s hydraulics and the peeling of the flat-ended bells that I can dredge up from submarine depths become the “memory-sound,” a configuration that, in the manner of Wittgenstein’s puzzle of how in memory you “see”

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yourself and your friend at the table rather than just the friend and table that you saw from your own POV at the original time, is inflected with a remainder. This remainder incorporates sounds heard between the ears that I have attributed to the scene of the goats retrospectively: ex post facto interior sounds that have been conjured by later goats, by earlier bus journeys, by my spoken words describing the shepherd’s cap in another context, by the acoustic atmosphere that was present in that subsequent conversation. Wittgenstein’s metaphorical allusion to “photograph” gets recalibrated as a series of literal recordings that while not “evidence for that past situation”—at least in any uncomplicated way—nonetheless help “to convince me now that this was how things were then” and to compose accordingly. Wittgenstein’s allusion to the photograph—transposed into our terms as the recording—is suggestive of a suspicion that the depression of the shutter or the record button might mediatize a scene which when viewed or listened to afterwards as media becomes the substitute material for our memories of that scene. “I hear us still,” but hear us now through the discernible textures associated with the specific recording technology used in the field.4 Squatting on my haunches, a little unbalanced, I lean the pistol-grip towards the metal rungs of the fence. A sharp tang of wet straw. The buffalo’s eyes are fringed with delicate lashes, its jaw swings to the left and then to the right, bubbles of snot expand and contract from its nostrils. I shift my weight and my knee cartilage cracks once, the plastic overshoes adjust themselves to my new position. A hot, wet, strong exhalation of breath and then, short pause, a ragged inhalation. A stream of piss hoses from the buffalo’s hindquarters, the chewing and snorting continue uninterrupted. Before setting aside this account of the implications of technology in relation to sound memory, I want to consider one final dimension and speculate fleetingly on how the use of recording devices in the field may operate to expedite or impede what I remember of my journeys in the

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mountains. On the one hand, there is the possibility that the cables, the pistol-grip, the headphones, the backpack, the LED lights—the apparatus—might conspire to render the moment of recording a conscious one, to supply the mental and bodily concentration that makes a stage on which to enact the theater of memory, to crystallize our memory-words and memory-sounds. From this perspective, arranging the equipment becomes a ritual that commemorates the shift from the period of open environmental listening into a narrowed temporal episode devoted to the preservation (in wetware as much as in hardware) of the vibrating pulse. On the other hand, is there a risk, when sitting in the deep, sun-splashed snow with a hydrophone placed to catch the drips falling from the first icicles to melt on Monte Polveracchio, that recording might offer a distraction from the sonic detail of the moment, might sing a technological lullaby to send the ears to sleep? Does the shift in focus from attentive, active listening towards the forgetful distractedness of reliance on a prosthetic substitute, raise the media substitute—the recording as Wittgenstein’s photograph—above the memory-sounds and memory-words? The short indented and italicized texts that I have inserted into this essay represent for me another way of connecting memory-words to memory-sounds and the writing of these is equally dependent on encountering my recordings as imperfect testimonies of “how things were then.” The hundred word anecdotes are less transcriptions of particular audio files and more akin to a textual analogue of my approach to composition—they participate in parallel operations of selection and layering. These texts endeavor to locate me as a breathing companion to the recording apparatus as it slowly depletes its batteries. From one perspective, this writing is an attempt to accommodate the remainder that cannot be heard in my compositional work, whether that appears in performance, in an album, or as soundtrack. The short passages seek to grasp at the wholly other that is still impelled by the chains of agitated molecules that carry origin and path but which is also an excess that may well never be amenable to being fixed in any such media as a recording. Stated less obliquely, the texts are an effort to

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announce me as a listening subject and a remembering subject, listening and remembering in the field and listening and remembering at my kitchen table. Wolf tracks are preserved in the snow by this morning’s hard frost. My mouth is full of the wild garlic that I’ve been plucking from the forest floor as we climb our way higher and higher. Bending to palm water from the rushing stream I spy a salamander padding across the wet beech leaves—patches of acid yellow joining a rubbery black. Returning to the refuge, our bodies feel the cold that our exertions had kept at bay. A fire cracks through its twigs and we unwrap our sandwiches from tinfoil. Red wine from a demijohn and Enzo’s gentle snores. My aspiration with these shadow texts is that they might perform a partial recovery of the multiply memorial conditions of sound. They are there to evoke origin and path, of course, and device, too, but, equally, they are there to evoke the listening and remembering that occurs in what is traditionally conceived of as the field as well as that re-listening and re-remembering that occurs when I return to the table at home. Reflexively, the site of home should equally be considered a field in its own right, or, better, the field should be expanded to encompass both elsewhere and home, in a partial, multiple, shifting and contingent morphology.5 Moreover, the phantom writing allows me to properly honor the conviction that if the procession of sound can never be begun without a company of memories, it also always attracts other raucous crowds: the senses and the feelings. If pure phonography is able to abstract itself from embodiment and hover weightless, with neither shadow nor friction, my own fieldwork is a human sprawl of taste, excitement, past associations, tiredness, conviviality, exchange, and messy relationships conducted with the other sensory experiences that inevitably engage me. Thus the apparent vitality of the recording becomes infected by the memory-words and memory-sounds in composition. Mine is also fieldwork—with field stretching between elsewhere and kitchen table—that recognizes that

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just as these “human” elements will shade my practices of listening, recording and composing—and the memories that attach to these—so too will my own physiology. Although our fleshy pinna contribute very little to the perception of sound, nevertheless, the distinctive form of our outer ears speaks usefully of the fundamental individuality of hearing. Up in the mountains in Italy, my sound memories depended on biometric individuality: an older person, I heard differently, less responsive to higher frequencies, slower to detect inter-aural distance (and hence to locate sound events temporally and spatially) and very sensitive to the onset of abrupt increases of amplitude, especially when fatigued. I had at first missed the owls that the forest ranger pointed towards through dripping trees. I stood pained and shocked in the fumes that hung suspended in the air after the motocross bikes roared past, my younger friend exhilarating in the same auditory experience. The light fades from the sky above the park bench and the children are arranged by gender and by age. The boys have chosen the left-hand side and the youngest have committed to a game resembling football in its shouts, exertions and elaborate celebrations but without visible goal posts. The older boys stand to survey the scene. The younger girls have linked arms to patrol the right, heads bowed to each others’ whispers. The older girls mirror the older boys. Emissaries dart between the left and the right. My microphone spotted, I am treated to animal imitations of great facility. It is one thing to accept that what is audible recollects prior origin just as it recalls the path traveled. It is another to recognize that the recording is not blank registration but that it also participates in a selectiveness—a faultiness—that might itself be structurally analogous to remembering and that might, too, impel us to forget our own perceptual presence. It is still something else to acknowledge the injection of memory-words and memory-sounds into processes of listening and composing—in the field of elsewhere and in the field of the table at home—while

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simultaneously attempting to explicitly hinge those processes to the eccentricities of taste, physiology, and the participation of other senses. To accept, recognize, and acknowledge in these ways is ultimately to commit to an awareness that all sound is memory. There are internal and external implications that flow from such a commitment. The internal implications find me solitary in an expanded zone. I listen for memories and remember myself listening. I think sound along the spectrum that spreads between the home-field and the elsewhere-field and struggle to address audiences by soaking dry recordings with the goo of memory-sounds and memory-words and the fleshy gloop of feelings and senses. I can hear these internal implications working themselves through my album Some Memories of Bamboo (2009). The internal implications make for the possessive individualism of my sound memories: my sounds, my listening, my remembering and my composing, my memories of bamboo. Where the external implications open up is at that precise point when here comes everybody, when reciprocity is let inside. The sound memories are still mine—there is no capitulation to the disembodied, pure document—but these memories are no longer exclusively mine. They are concurrently the sound memories of others, too. Others who are collaborators like the Silent Mountain film-maker Chiara Caterina. Others who imitate animal noises in the park in Filetta or who ride motorcross bikes or who use a forked stick to herd goats. Others who, in conversations on wintry mountainsides or at the kitchen table or from the audience, offer up their own memory-words and map their own memory-sounds, who may bring their own recordings. Others who I have tried to welcome into my phantom texts. The external implications involve exchange and it is the challenge of our work together on Silent Mountain in the years ahead to make that exchange audible. In the small cobblers in the neighboring frazione, photographs, a calendar, newspaper clippings and religious icons are what I see on the

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walls. Machines and tools, shoes and boots waiting collection, smells of leather, rubber and glue. The glass door opens again and traffic and voices spill in, joining the conversation that is resuming after our interruption. The card game scopa is being played out on a table. Two grand-daughters emerge from behind the wooden counter and a wave of shouted happiness: “Mamma mia!” One wears my headphones, the other breathes songs into the microphone. I will remember to remember.

Notes 1 Silent Mountain began as a residency commission from the Fondazione Aurelio Petroni which involved contributing to the exhibition Viso Come Territorio (June 2012) that was held in the village of San Cipriano Picentino where my fieldwork had been focused. Since then that fieldwork has been translated into: a soundmap hosted at favouritesounds.org (June 2012); the composition “Acqua Bianca” included in the group show Carroussa Sonore in Rabat, Morocco and curated by Younes Baba-Ali and Anna Raimondo (July 2012); a live performance duo with sand artist Lucio Esposito at the Marte Art Centre in Cava de’ Tirreni (October 2012); an eight-channel composition “Camminare Nella Neve”, curated by Soundfjord at Goldsmiths Great Hall (June 2013); the collaborative text-image work “Field Signals” with Chiara Caterina, published in uniformagazine 2, Winter-Spring 2015, pp. 20–23; the collaborative film “Sulla Strada del Polverrachio” with Chiara Caterina shown once at the Jerwood Gallery Hastings (June 3, 2015) as part of Sissu Tarka’s VZ ; the performance talk “Memories of Shadows on the Silent Mountain” at the Land/Water Symposium, Plymouth University (June 24, 2015); in the article “Silent Mountain” in Reliquiae Volume 3, pp. 80–83 (November 2015); and in the booklet and microsite In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain (Gruenrekorder, Frankfurt: Gruen 162, 2016). 2 The idea of media registering their facticity through their technological artifacts was a subject I navigated in “Once A Certain Notion”, an essay in Photoworks magazine (2005–2006). 3 It was in Nietzsche’s second essay of The Genealogy of Morals where I first came across the term mnemotechnics. For Nietzsche, “perhaps indeed

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there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory”— this is the main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth. . . Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself ” (Nietzsche 1989: 61). I am considering memory as an altogether more benign faculty than that which emerges from Nietzsche’s anthropology of horror and I acknowledge that this other side of memory, the brutality of its public management, does need to be addressed. 4 The suggestion that the photograph might be substitute for the existence of memory—or conversely that a non-existent photograph might have been “falsely” remembered—was an undercurrent in my essay “From Memory” (2012). 5 For more on the condition of the field in sound art see Lane and Carlyle (2013). For a constellation of anthropological thinking on this matter, see Marcus (1995), Gupta and Ferguson (1997). For an insightful exploration of the spatial and social boundaries between the public and private that might be mapped onto a cartography of field and home see Colomina (1996). An extended exploration of the constitution of the field within sound arts practices, one that offered considerable personal inspiration, is found in the work of Mark Peter Wright. See, for example: “Still Listening,” Interference: A Journal of Audio Cultures, 4: 2014, online; and Tasked to Hear (2013, Corbel Stone Press). His conception of “elsewhere fields” has been particularly influential.

Works cited Beyer, R. T. (1999), Sounds of Our Times. New York: AIP /Springer Verlag. Carlyle, A. (2005–2006), “Once A Certain Notion,” Photoworks, November/ April, 6–7. Carlyle, A. (2009), Some Memories of Bamboo. Frankfurt: Gruenrekorder. Carlyle, A. (2012), “From Memory,” Journal of Photographic Culture, 5(2):215–18. Carlyle, A. (2016) In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain. Frankfurt: Gruenrekorder.

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Colomina, B. (1996), Sexuality and Space, 4th Edition. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Goodman, S. (2010), Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson, eds (1997), Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Oakland: University of California Press. Ingold, T. (2011 [2007]), “Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather”, Being Alive. London: Routledge. Lane, C. (2007), “Sounds, History, Memory”, in A. Carlyle (ed.), Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice. Paris: Double Entendre. Lane, C. (2014), “Gaoth (Wind)” from The Hebrides Suite. Frankfurt: Gruenrekorder. Lane, C. and A. Carlyle (2013), In The Field: The Art of Field Recording. Axminster: Uniformbooks. López, F. (2007), Wind [Patagonia]. Seattle: And/oar. Marcus, G. E. (1995), “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Nietzsche, F. (1989 [1887]), On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage. Rogers, T. (2010), Synthesizing Sound: Metaphor in Audio-Technical Discourse and Synthesis History, PhD diss., Montreal: McGill University. Seneca, L. A. (2004 [1969]), Letters From A Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium, Revised Edition. London: Penguin. Taussig, M. (2011), I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tyndall, J. (2005 [1867]), Sound: A Course of Eight Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Unabridged Facsimile. London: Elibron Classics. Watson, C. (1996), “Low Pressure”, from Stepping Into The Dark. London: Torch. Wittgenstein, L. (2007 [1967]), Zettel, 40th Anniversary Edition. Oakland: University of California Press.

sonic thought ii

Thaumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and Non-Thinking Thomas Köner

This article explains a practise of artistic creation by following the thought process that goes along with the development of a piece, clarifying and defining the directions that my work can take. First let me assume there is a seed element at the core of my works, around which the creative process will unfold: this seed is a sense of place (topos). Similar to the series in serialism, it provides me with a strategy and serves as the basic intelligence of the piece, radiating from its center to the outside, where it will eventually appear in the aesthetic register, as beauty. To understand this seed it will be helpful to explain first what it is not. It is not an understanding of place that could be accomplished by the practices known as field recording (a sonic description or commentary on a geographic location). Field recording as a practice actually combines three sets of activities which could more precisely be described as field listening, field recording, and field playback, and I will explain briefly why these are not helpful. 1.

Field listening is not it. It is just ordinary listening, unless you claim that listening to This (sonic situation) is more rewarding/ interesting/valuable than listening to That. This claim lies at the center of the activity, and in more than one way it is a forced gesture. The notion of being “at a special place” demands the acceptance of a world view that postulates a hierarchy of places, in which the special place on top is attributed more value than the 83

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not-so-special. As these places are so special, “Human Disturbance” often is to be avoided, thereby enforcing the view that Nature and Humans are separate and distinct entities. This is an ideology well known from the Bible and so forth, and also not helpful. Field recording is not it. It is impossible to share a listening experience. Listening is internal, psychological. It is a very personal and active process that filters and mixes in a creative way within every listener, and is not only determined by the physiology of the ear, its frequency range or the drop or loss of it, but also by knowledge and education and personal preferences based on the individual’s biography. Whatever sound appears, it enters through this psychological antechamber and leaves it changed, modulated by the acoustics of the mind. These cannot be recorded and also not shared, like all experiences that are full of “qualia,” notorious for being inaccessible for others and impossible to share. (I do not even go into the topic of insufficiency of any microphones involved in the recording attempt.) Field playback is not it. What we have is the playback of a loudspeaker-emitted noise, which is surrounded by various amounts of other (not loudspeaker-emitted) noises. A sound created by a loudspeaker is not a sound, it is a loudspeakercreated sound. Whatever the recordist asserts, what I hear is a loudspeaker generated sound, the loudspeaker stands in my room and sounds not very interesting.

Therefore the place, the seed around which our creative process unfolds, cannot be a geographical one. Is it non-geographical, and therefore non-temporal? A fluid da capo between the present that has passed and the overture of the present that has not yet come? No, the “eternal now” commonly associated with music is not it. If there was a now, there would also be a memory of that now which begets a memory of the remembered moment and so forth: the now never appears without a timeline. This timeline is not horizontal, it almost hurls down into the dim haze of the unconscious where it quickly becomes invisible. It is

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like walking through a minefield, and for sure memory traces will be triggered, probably many marks that are memorized as unpleasant will respond, and it is impossible to predict when this will happen. This becomes important for the process of defining durations, the appearances and the general density of events within a piece. My audiovisual works are often characterized by a very low event density. To work with the attention span is almost like the painter working with his brush: these lines are lines drawn with an invisible ink, shapes that disappear and re-emerge and are experienced as a palpable part of the work’s texture. Its reception is therefore shaped by absence (of attention) as well as presence. (In my occasional and rare occupation as a Pop/Rock/Techno remixer I use a mundane variation of this technique in the sense that I work with absence in the mix much more than with presence, with absent signals that do not appear in the mix but nevertheless provide texture, echoes and trails, etc.) True attention is like sound: it is able to penetrate almost any object. Fading attention is also like sound, a distant hum that dissolves in the background. Beyond the limits of attention span there are wild, uncharted territories. These are fields worthy to record! There is a temptation to stretch this space of attention even further, and it keeps expanding and eventually collapses into the tiniest point that I above referred to as seed. My wife is doing Yoga, and I understand that Yoga is about learning to make a connection to the source which is, according to the Hindu/Yoga tradition, of course vibration. This tradition claims that the internal, “unmade,” “unstruck” sound arises from the heart region (therefore it is called anahata nada). It is in rare moments of deep meditation/concentration, when the “outer world” actually feels inexistent, that this sound appears. According to my experience I would locate it rather on the right side of the body, between chest and right ear. I heard it as a very thin sound, like an infinitely long and elastic spider’s thread, and with a very high pitch. It is the most subtle, fragile sound I have ever heard. Does this mean one is able to perceive life in all its aspects as one single music? Or does it rather indicate a tinnitus?

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The “unstruck” sound is not it. It is as any meditative state a kind of autosuggestion. The transformation of ordinary experiences into deep listening situations is not it. The gesture of attributing value to one situation and denying it the other is a violent one. All events in the universe have the same value, that is, no value. Who would be in the position to assign it anyway? And a composer’s assertion that “the composition” is “complete” is immediately disproved by claiming the opposite. Her/his assertion can never be verified, which means that we do not have a single complete composition: Music does not exist. And how could it? The beat has no presence and can only point to the following beat, the insubstantial note depends completely on its neighbors in the melodic line, the chord is dispensable after its harmonic release and one abstract noise obstructs the other. These elements are obviously marginal, peripheral gestures that I have emphatically peripherized in my work. The only expression that is independent and able to communicate itself is tone color. Tone color is not a sign, but a spectral power that enables resonance. And as it became clear, the mysterious seed, the topos of all sonic expression, lies in tone color, or the awareness of it, which is its resonance. The textbook definition of tone color can only describe what it is not: qualities of sound not related to pitch, volume, or duration. Tone color is therefore the absence and yet the total presence. For example, a mother reading a fairy tale to her child is reading words made of letters, but the child hears the mother’s “I love you” in her voice. This is resonance. I throw a pebble in a lake and there is resonance. If the pebble is dirty, there is still resonance. There is a sense of purity. Thoughts create resonance. Sounds create resonance. Resonance is pristine, detached of the object. Appearing as tone color, sound has the potential to become its own resonance, effortless and luminous. Let us liberate sound into the radiance of the clear space!

sonic thought iii

The Sounds of Things Heiner Goebbels

First, and much too early, you invent a title for your lecture and many months later you start thinking what you actually should be talking about. So I was happy that I could use this academic bluff as an opportunity to rethink what the “things” or “the sound of things” meant to me in my works—as well as in my musical composition and my theater works. And surprisingly I discovered that, for example, my first tape composition, written thirty-five years ago, was based only on a recording of the unnerving, annoying bells in the foyer of the Frankfurter Schauspielhaus.

“What’s this? By all the gods I hear something.” (Sophocles) I do not know if those bell sounds are still the same, I have not been there for a while. Their function was to call the audience to the seats at the beginning of the performance or to call them back in time after the break, and the classical form of a drama always has breaks. Basically it was the same bell-sound as the one I experienced in the secondary school of my childhood at 7.55 in the morning. It does not surprise me that the theater has a tendency to treat its audience like class members. And maybe it’s true what some people say about me, who know me quite well, that the widespread and musical use of noise in my compositions is a reaction to the fact that I hate noise in reality—a revenge. However, the bells turned into a sound composition for an Oedipus performance directed by Hans Neuenfels in 1979. I recorded 87

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the sound of the ringing bells as they are, added layers of those recordings, produced unexpected interruptions and rhythms, and slightly changed their pitch by speeding up or slowing down the tape machines to create an alarming microtonal cluster—I do not remember its exact dramaturgical function in the play, it was probably to prepare for, or to mark, a tragic catastrophe on stage. But I promise, at that time it was not consciously meant as an anti-institutional criticism on the Stadttheater. But for an audience which was used to following this signal, an adaptation and amplification of the house bells turned into the soundtrack of this performance might have confronted the system with its own authoritarian structure.

“I shoot, I’m not joking!” (A Policeman) A few years later—as my first single record to be released in 1981—I composed “Berlin Q-Damm 12.4.81”. The composition is focused on a documentary field recording of civilian policemen, protesters, and onlookers during a demonstration in Berlin. And it starts with a constant repetition of the sound of smashing a glass window. This characteristic sound is a sudden opening for the rhythm of the piece, marks the violence of the situation and punctuates the voice of a moderator, who presented and commented the dramatic acoustic scenery on the radio the same day: About 9.30 pm in front of the department-store Wertheim on Kurfürstendamm, the protest march has left in the direction of the Gedächtniskirche. Two young men throw stones into two small glass cabinets. Suddenly two elder men in plain clothes break off the crowd of spectators and lunge at those who threw the stones. “Stop! Police!! Or I shoot!” A gun is unlocked and held sideward to the head of one arrested. “Stop! Come along! I shoot, I’m not joking!” “Who are you?” “Police!” “Show me!” “You can see it later!” “Take the gun away! Take the gun away!! Take the gun away!!!”

The five-minute sound collage includes several different compositiontechniques: programed analog synthesizer phrases, filtering, tape-

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scratching, cuts and loops, temporarily played backwards, a prepared piano, cembalo clusters, screaming trombone sounds, a heavily distorted e-guitar followed by a smoothly played acoustic guitar—on various layers of looped trombone and cello-parts, which I had recorded with the method of so called “Frippertronics.” Everything (except the trombone) was performed by myself. But the core of the piece, with which everything started—musically and in reality—is the breaking glass; the confrontation between “violence against things” answered by the threat to shoot. But to tell you the truth: the documentary recording did not include the smashing of the glass, the journalist switched his tape recorder on only after the glass cabinet was destroyed; so I recorded that sound much later at home while a flat in my neighborhood was renovated.

“The sound is plaintive, high-pitched, somewhat nasal.” (Alain Robbe-Grillet) Ten years after—in 1991—I looped the sound of high heels walking and added a sequence of instrumental chords to the regular pulse of the steps, which I had recorded on a sideway in Boston the year before. I used it to produce the voyeuristic atmosphere of a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet called La Jalousie. The double meaning of “La Jalousie” in French (jealousy/window blind) allowed him to totally avoid mentioning the emotion, but to evoke it in the reader by a description of the “things” and the sounds instead: the window blind, the unfolding of a letter, a hairbrush, the house, the shadow of the pillar, a banana plantation, the car etc. All described very precisely by an absent narrator around a woman named with the letter “A.” The narrator also mentions Franck, a friend of the house, who is making (too . . .) frequent visits. And the scene culminates when this friend offers “A” a ride in his car to the next largest village store in order to do some “shopping”—and by the character of the writing we are suggested to think of her as the wife of the narrator. The structure of the novel stays seductively vague and is hard to grasp, we cannot be sure

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that this trip ever happens; and if and why Franck and “A” had to stay overnight; because the car had a mechanical problem . . .? Whatever happens—it is only in the narrator’s or even more in the reader’s imagination. In his autobiography Ghosts in the Mirror Robbe-Grillet spoke about the indescribable world, which is created by the sounds around the house in his novel. “How is it,” he said, “that so little has been said about the role of hearing in his novel” (Robbe-Grillet 1991: 29). That’s what I tried to do in this composition for a chamber orchestra originally commissioned for the Ensemble Modern. Fifteen years before La Jalousie was published, Francis Ponge wrote “Le parti pris des choses”/“The Voice of Things”. And in all his poetic chapters—a collection of descriptions of things such as a candle, a stone, a bar of soap, a flower and a lot of other things—you rarely find any word about their sound. My composition is about twenty minutes long and the passage of the woman’s footsteps becomes a very specific moment where time stands still. Nothing else is happening: regular chords, regular footsteps, over and over again, approximately for about three minutes. As a space, an aside for our imagination. For Alain Robbe-Grillet the description of sounds, the sounds of often even unidentifiable things is an important part of his subversive aesthetics in his writing. Let us listen for a moment to the absent narrator in La Jalousie while he’s probably waiting for the woman named “A” to come back from her day trip to the city. Then a silence. But a fainter sound, something like a hum, makes the ear strain. . . . It stops at once. And again the lamp’s hissing can be heard. Besides, it was more like a growl than the sound of a car motor. . . . Now there is a duller sound, less fugitive, that attracts the attention: a kind of growl, or rumble, or hum . . . But even before being sufficiently clear to be identified, the noise stops. The ear, which vainly tries to locate it again in the darkness, no longer hears anything in its place except the hiss of the kerosene lamp. Its sound is plaintive, high-pitched, somewhat nasal. But its complexity permits it to have

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overtones at various levels. Of an absolute evenness, both muffled and shrill, it fills the night and the ears as if it came from nowhere. Robbe-Grillet 1959: 71–3

Alain Robbe-Grillet describes his work as an author “in order to destroy the nightmares, the night ghosts which devastate my day life by describing them.” And in the same autobiography—he calls it automythography because you never know what is the truth or how to find the right words for it—he continues: All reality is indescribable, and I know it instinctively: consciousness is structured like our language (and with good reason!); not so the world or the unconscious. I can’t use words and phrases to describe what’s in front of me, nor what’s lurking in my head or in my sex. Robbe-Grillet 1991: 11

So it is no surprise to us that he rather trusts the uncertainty of unknown sounds to represent what he has in front of him, to surround and express his unconscious desires and nightmares, which are hidden in the head of the unnamed narrator, or maybe in his wishful thinking. On this bad road the driver cannot straighten out in time. The blue sedan is going to crash into a roadside tree whose rigid foliage scarcely shivers under the impact, despite its violence. The car immediately bursts into flames. The whole bush is illuminated by the crackling, spreading fire. It is the sound the centipede makes, motionless again on the wall, in the center of the panel. Listening to it more carefully, this sound is more like a breath than a crackling: the brush is now moving down the loosened hair. No sooner has it reached the bottom than it quickly enters the ascending phase of the cycle, describing a curve that brings it back to its point of departure on the smooth hair of the head, where it begins moving down once again. Robbe-Grillet 1959: 80

You see how unreliable the subtle sounds of things here are, and how they provide the narrator’s and our, the reader’s, obsessive imagination. The crackling of the burning bush after an explosive car

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crash is turning into the sound of a motionless centipede, which we have heard before in the novel. Or maybe was it a breath? Of whom? Or rather the sound of a brush moving down the loosened hair of the woman named “A,” who is suspected to have an affair with Franck, maybe? Or is Franck maybe the name of the other lover, Last Year in Marienbad, a cine-roman by Alain Robbe-Grillet, which he wrote for Alain Resnais? You never can be sure with those Alains. And we never can be sure with the sounds, the sounds of things because they have their own secret life. They do not have our flesh and blood. We never know what to expect next. They represent the other world, which we cannot master. In a publication about Robbe-Grillet’s inter-medial aesthetics, his web of visual, acoustic and cinematic strategies of writing, Martin Lindwedel calls his attention towards objects a “solidarity with the things” against an “anthropocentric atmosphere” (Lindwedel 2004: 20). And such a solidarity is what I am looking for, when I am trying to create an un-hierarchical balance in the world of sounds, which also takes place in my music theater works.

“for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not tones of any being.” (Edgar Allen Poe) The music theater piece “Black on White” was composed for the instrumentalists of the Ensemble Modern in 1996 along the lines of the novel “Shadow” by Edgar Allen Poe. This parable starts with “Ye who read are still among the living but I who write will have long since gone into the region of shadows” (Poe 2012: 601) and already half a century before Roland Barthes it refers elegantly to “the death of the author.” So it is the sound of a writing hand, which intrigued me and inspired me to various electroacoustic and instrumental parts within that composition (Writing I, II , III . . .). The sound of the writing hand becomes more and more independent in the progress of the piece among other acoustic elements to be heard beyond the instruments of

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the ensemble. Also the chord of a boiling teapot, a C major triad, which first the flute player and finally the whole orchestra play along with. All those non-instrumental often electronically or acoustically processed sounds mark outer forces, to which the group of musicians, gathered in a “noble hall,” are exposed, as—all of a sudden—to the shadow on the wall in the parable of Edgar Allen Poe.

“There are developments of sounds, detached sounds, silences, trills.” (Paul Valéry) In “Max Black” (1998) I changed from tea to coffee: here actually the sound of an espresso pot is the starting signal for an explosive concert of things in a laboratory with chain reactions between thoughts, sounds, fire, images and words of Paul Valéry: “I get up. I immediately go off to make the first ritual coffee not knowing whether it works as substance of my chemistry or as savor and stimulant more by affecting senses than by modifying molecular make-up or indeed whether it has a nervous effect, for all 3 hypotheses can be advanced.” Valéry 1990a: 287

To all those moments in my previous work as a composer the presence of things might not yet act as a major character of the works in total, but the things rather show up, they capture the space, they conquer more and more the performances and the compositions, they choreograph the words, the movements and actions. The more they insist on their being, the more they call for respect, for their own timing—rather to speed something up—and they do not fade away, they stay; like in “Max Black” when using the live-sampling program called “LISA .” Or they decelerate the attention because they are featured in a prominent way. Those things mark the most intriguing moments for me and also for the spectator’s experience. Because the audience seems to be most attentive, since somehow those things break the logic and the sovereignty of the human performers and we do not ever know what comes next.

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Originally it was a balance which interested me; a balance between the sound of things and the other acoustic events, which usually are ranked higher: the human voice in singing, the text, or the live performed music by instrumentalists. But rather the opposite happens. Those moments demonstrate an external structural power: creating a harmony or a pause, an unforeseeable chaotic element or a rhythm, which has to be followed by everybody, even the conductor. As soon as we hear the footsteps, the conductor has just to follow their speed. Or once the actor Andre Wilms has closed the espresso pot, he is faced with an unchangeable repetitive rhythm he has to follow with all his words and actions in the ongoing performance. Those things were sometimes hard to manage in a composition when I did not have a sampler yet—like in the days when I worked with this smashing glass sound. In 1981 I had a couple of tape-machines instead and tried to run them in time, to start them in time, to go backwards and make a tape scratching, which was quite difficult and could not easily be incorporated in an academic sound system anyway.

“We suddenly heard a strange noise that neither of us had ever heard before.” (Adalbert Stifter) Finally I wanted to dedicate a complete work to the things in an installative performance called “Stifters Dinge” (2007). It is a piece with five pianos, with water, rain, fog and ice, with stones, metal and a lot of different acousmatic voices. Adalbert Stifter, an Austrian writer in the first half of the nineteenth century, used the word “thing” on nearly every page of his novels and stories, and things are standing in his work for objects, people, for other techniques or unknown cultures; it also stands for ecological catastrophes, and nature observations like an icefall which he describes in a text I use in this production. “I had never seen that thing like this before.” Basically he calls the unknown part of the world “things,” and the Swiss specialist in German Studies, Heinrich

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Mettler, once said “out of reverence to things—aus Ehrfurcht vor den Dingen—as they are by themselves, Adalbert Stifter leaves them as they are, as they show themselves to us.” Actually the way he describes the sounds remembers us to the sound observations by Alain RobbeGrillet, but Stifter is more modest. He doesn’t interpret them or even attach them with anthropomorphic or even obsessive emotional moments. “While we were eventually nearing the valley where the forest lay across our road, from among the blackwood that stood to our right on some rocks we suddenly heard a strange noise that neither of us had ever heard before. It was as though thousands, if not millions of glass shards were rustling and clinking against each other and as if in this chaos the sounds were travelling into the distance. The blackwood was, however, still too far away for us to recognise the sound. In the silence that reigned on the earth and in heaven, the noise seemed very strange to us.” Stifter 2007

While we hear this reading of Adalbert Stifter’s ice story, we see a picture by Jacob Isaacksz Ruisdael from the seventeenth century “called Swamp,” which is very slowly changing its color; so slowly, that it’s actually hard to perceive it at the same time while we try to understand the complex syntax of the language. This production was an experiment in creating a piece without any human body on stage: no musician, no performer, no dancer, no singer; just five pianos and a lot of things like motors, engines, stones moving on top of each other, and a few tubes. It is also an experiment to change the order between things; to turn those things into protagonists, which in theater usually just have a serving and illustrative role—even the technique itself, the light, the engines, etc.—to turn the hierarchy upside down. For example when there is a musical communication between the sound of a shutter of a light projector and the shouting voice of a sailor in Papua New Guinea which we hear in an ethnographical recording made in 1904.

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So regarding the sounds of things, or the sounds of thinking, or the sound of thinking things, especially when encountering performances of this piece, it demonstrates a different way of experiencing, or even confronting, the way we perceive the sounds of things on a day to day basis. It gives us a bigger freedom for our imagination and also it avoids this enormous reflex we have to upload things with an anthropomorphic center. Those sounds also avoid the reflex to mirror ourselves, to identify ourselves with what we see and hear. Sounds of the things do not allow an easy identification. And that is what I basically try to work on: not to work on a direct encounter with somebody we can recognize, but rather on an indirect encounter with alterity.

“We listened and stared; I don’t know whether it was amazement or fear of driving deeper into that thing.” (Adalbert Stifter) After a performance of this piece in Munich Manfred Eicher, the producer of ECM records, said: “Let’s make a CD.” “What?” I answered, “this is such a beautiful, visual piece—why do you want to make a CD ?” and forgot his wonderful proposal for about two years until the sound engineer of Stifters Dinge, Willi Bopp, told me that he had made a 24 track recording out of the blue. And I “listened and stared.” And all of a sudden I discovered a lot of things, “a lot of things,” which I have not heard, neither in the rehearsals nor in hundreds of performances I have attended. Probably because, of course, the visuals very much dominate what we hear. Specially when there is an identity between what we hear and what we see, it is the acoustic stage which rather amplifies our visual senses. But in Stifters Dinge I work with a division of those two stages. A separation between the visual stage and the acoustic stage. And this division of these two different perception modes is first of all a space for imagination. But it also allows us to separate it—so you can just listen to it, to an only acoustically recorded and mixed down CD — originally against my own interest (Goebbels 2012).

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Works cited Goebbels, H. (1992), Berlin Q-damm 12.4.81, on Goebbels Heart, CD evva disk 33007. Goebbels, H. (2012), Stifters Dinge, CD ecm new series 2216. Lindwedel, M. (2004), Alain Robbe-Grillets intermediale Ästhetik des Bildes, trans. H. Goebbels, Dissertation Hannover. Available online: http://d-nb. info/979170117/34 (accessed October 6, 2015). Poe, E. A. (2012), “Shadow—A Parable”, in Complete Stories and Poems. New York: Barnes & Noble. Robbe-Grillet, A. (1959), Jealousy, trans. R. Howard. New York: Grove Press. Robbe-Grillet, A. (1991), Ghosts in the Mirror. A Romanesque, trans. J. Levy. New York: Grove Press. Sophocles (2014), Oedipus the King, trans. I. Johnston, line 1741. Available online: https://records.viu.ca/∼johnstoi/sophocles/antigone.htm (accessed October 6, 2015). Stifter, A. (2007), Extract from “Die Mappe meines Urgrossvaters” [My Great Grandfather’s Portfolio]. Transcription of the third edition, file 149, trans. M. Heard, Programbook Stifters Dinge. Lausanne: Theatre Vidy. Valéry, P. (1990a) Cahiers/Hefte, vol. 1, trans. H. Goebbels. Frankfurt: S. Fischer. Valéry, P. (1990b) Cahiers/Hefte, vol. 4, trans. H. Goebbels. Frankfurt: S. Fischer.

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Sonic Thought Christoph Cox

Philosophical aesthetics suffers from a peculiar arrogance toward its object of inquiry, an arrogance that the “non-philosopher” François Laruelle calls “the principle of sufficient philosophy.”1 With this clumsy phrase, Laruelle names the pretension of philosophy to elevate itself above any object or discourse so as to offer a philosophy of it: a philosophy of science, of art, of music, etc. For millennia, philosophy has conceived itself as the “queen of the sciences,” claiming the ability to reveal what its object cannot reveal about itself: the essence, nature, or fundamental reality of that object. Philosophy thus dominates its object, subjecting it to philosophical rule. Convinced that its object is fundamentally ignorant about itself, philosophy is little concerned with what that object has to say on its own behalf. How might one challenge this domination, allow the object to speak, put it on equal footing with philosophical thinking, permit it to generate concepts rather than solely to be subject to them? In the case of music and sound, what would it mean to think sonically rather than merely to think about sound? How can sound alter or inflect philosophy? What concepts and forms of thought can sound itself generate? These are the questions I want to address here. My aim is to track some of the ways that philosophy has or could be inflected by sound in order to produce not a philosophy of sound or music but a sonic philosophy.

Sonic ontology Sonic philosophy begins not from music as a set of cultural objects but from the deeper experience of sound as flux, event, and effect. Arthur 99

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Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche are exemplary figures here, for both present not a metaphysics of music but a musical metaphysics. For Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, music directly figures the world as it is in itself, the primary forces and movements that drive all natural change, tension, creation, and destruction. In a passage celebrated by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer writes: “Music . . . expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomena. . . . [It] gives the innermost kernel preceding all form, or the heart of things” (Schopenhauer 1969: 262–3).2 For Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, music and sound are philosophically important because they present us with an ontology that unsettles our ordinary conception of things. In philosophy, ontology is the sub-discipline that investigates being, determining what there is or what sorts of things exist. We ordinarily operate with an ontology that begins and ends with what J. L. Austin wryly called “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods,” the objects of our everyday experience: apples, chairs, trees, cars, etc. (Austin 1962: 8). This ordinary ontology extends to include larger objects such as mountains or stars, and can accept scientific objects such as sub-atomic particles, provided that they are taken to be tiny versions of ordinary things—stable, solid, and durable, though very small. Indeed, when we speak of “matter,” we tend to think solely of solid matter. (Few, I think, would take liquids, gases, or plasmas—water, air, or fire, for example—as paradigms of matter.) This ordinary ontology privileges the senses of sight and touch; or rather, the senses of sight and touch determine this everyday ontology. The invisible, intangible, and ephemeral objects (so to speak) of smell, taste, and hearing seem to have only a shadowy existence relative to the standard of the ordinary solid object, whose presence is guaranteed by eyes and fingers, and enshrined in “common sense,” which names an entrenched hierarchy of the senses rather than some common agreement among them. But surely sounds, odors, and tastes exist, and surely they are as material as sticks and stones. Sounds, to take the example that concerns me here, set eardrums aquiver, rattle walls, and shatter wine glasses.

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Indeed, sound is omnipresent and inescapable. Lacking earlids, we are forever and inescapably bathed in sound, immersed in it in a way that we are not immersed in a world of visible objects. An attention to sound, then, will provoke us to modify our everyday ontology and our common sense conception of matter. Sound lends credence to a very different sort of ontology and materialism, a conception of being and matter that can account for objecthood better than an ontology of objects can account for sounds.

Sonic flux Music has always posed an ontological problem, for (unlike the score or the recording that attempt to capture it) it is intangible and evanescent but nonetheless powerfully physical. This ontological problem is compounded by sound art, which, from its very inception in the late 1960s, challenged the ontology of objects and, in particular, the modernist work of art. Though clearly an outgrowth of the Cagean tradition in experimental music, sound art emerged within the milieu of postminimalist practices in the visual arts fostered by Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Robert Barry, Michael Asher, and others whose emphasis on process, multi-sensory experience, and immersion defied the autonomy, medium-specificity, and purely visual or optical conception of art characteristic of high modernism. Postminimalism’s challenge to these features of modernism opened two different paths for artistic practice. Art could pursue the “dematerialization of the art object” (Lippard 1973) by way of the concept, the idea, language, and discourse; or it could pursue an expanded conception of matter extending beyond the limited domain of ordinary, middle-sized, visual and tactile objects (paintings and sculptures, for example), a notion of matter understood as a profusion of energetic fluxes. While a few artists saw these two paths as parallel rather than divergent, conceptual art tended to follow the first path, sound art the second. In so doing, conceptualism was bolstered by a set

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of latently idealist theoretical programs insistent that our access to the real is fundamentally discursive, thus dismissing any notion of nondiscursive perception, materiality, or reality. During the 1970s and 1980s, this critical program came to dominate the visual and literary arts, offering powerful, sophisticated, and effective analyses of images and texts. By contrast, the provocation posed by sound art was not pursued philosophically or theoretically. As a result, sound art was left without a robust theoretical basis or mode of apprehension and was thus relegated to a minor status, at best an adjunct to music, at worst a naive or retrograde incursion into the visual arts. Thus, while conceptual art became a dominant concern for art historians and critics and a pervasive influence on the art of the past half-century, sound art remained (until recently) a minor and underground mode of art-making that attracted very little critical or art historical analysis. It is no coincidence, I think, that the emergence of powerful realist and materialist philosophies since the late 1990s has been paralleled by a renewed interest in sound. Sound art’s greatest forefather, John Cage, invited us to think of sound and music not as bounded by musical works but as an anonymous flux that precedes and exceeds human contributions to it. This conception of sound courses through the history of sound art, from Max Neuhaus’s Times Square, La Monte Young’s Dream House, and Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire to Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks, Francisco Lopez’s trilogy of the Americas, and the work of contemporary soundscape artists such as Chris Watson, Jana Winderen, and Toshiya Tsunoda. If we accept this Cagean conception, sound constitutes one flux among many, joining the profusion of flows cataloged by Manuel DeLanda in his magnificent book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, which conceives all of nature and culture as a collection of flows—flows of lava, genes, bodies, language, money, information, etc.—that are solidified and liquefied, captured and released by way of various processes that are isomorphic across these various domains (DeLanda 1997). Yet, as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche pointed out, the

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sonic flux is not just one flow among many; it deserves special status insofar as it so elegantly and forcefully models and manifests the myriad fluxes that constitute the natural world.

Sonic events Sound, then, affirms an ontology of flux in which objects are merely temporary concretions of fluid processes. This flux ontology replaces objects with events, an idea nicely demonstrated in a book that provides another exemplary instance of sonic philosophy: Casey O’Callaghan’s Sounds (O’Callaghan 2007). Sounds are intangible, ephemeral, and invisible; but O’Callaghan shows they are nonetheless real and mind-independent. Sounds persist in time and survive changes to their properties and qualities. Thus, they cannot be treated as secondary qualities (such as colors or tastes) that are relative to their observers; nor are they the properties of their sources, which cause or generate them but nonetheless remain distinct and separate. In short, sounds are not tied to objects or minds but are independently existing entities. This is exactly what Pierre Schaeffer (the father of musique concrète and one of the progenitors of sound art) aimed to show in his analysis of the objet sonore: the sonorous object considered independently of its source, an entity to which audio recording draws attention but that ordinary experience also routinely encounters (Schaeffer 2004: 76–81). For Schaeffer, the sonorous object has a peculiar existence distinct from the instrument that produces it, the medium in or on which it exists, and the mind of the listener. Sounds are not qualities of objects or subjects; rather, they are ontological particulars and individuals. Yet Schaeffer’s language of the “sonorous object” misses the mark. For sounds are peculiarly temporal and durational, tied to the qualities they exhibit over time. If sounds are particulars or individuals, then they are so not as static objects but as temporal events (O’Callaghan 2007: 11, 26–7, 57–71).

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Sound effects This ontology of events is unsettling, for it proposes that happenings, becomings, and changes exist independently of the subjects and objects that produce or undergo them. To put it another way, it gives priority to the verb, which is no longer conceived as subordinate to the noun. This is exactly the view proposed by that sonic philosopher Nietzsche, who argues that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; the ‘doer’ is only a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (Nietzsche 1992: 481). Or as Henri Bergson put it: “[t]here are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change: change has no need of a support” (Bergson 2007: 122; emphasis in the original). If sonic philosophy liberates the deed from the doer, becoming from being, the verb from the noun, it also liberates the effect from the cause. This ontology of the effect is richly developed by Gilles Deleuze, who, inspired by the Stoics, distinguishes between two kinds of entities.3 In the first place, there exist bodies that have various qualities, that act and are acted upon, and that inhabit states of affairs in the world. Yet, in addition to bodies, there exist incorporeal events or effects that are caused by bodies but differ in nature from them. Like Nietzsche, Deleuze asks us to think the ontology of the verb as distinct from that of the noun (bodies) and adjective (qualities): the verb as a pure becoming independent of a subject. Such becomings are best captured by verbs in the infinitive (“to cut,” “to eat,” “to redden,” etc.), which have no subject and are bound to no particular context (Deleuze 1990: 182–5). They simply describe various powers of alteration in the world, powers of becoming that are variously instantiated. As continuously varying fluxes that are separable from their causes and maintain their own independent existence, sounds exemplify this ontology of events and becomings, and do so in two senses. In the first place, sounds are not punctual or static objects but temporal, durational flows. They thus accord with an empirical account of events and becomings as processes and alterations. Beyond this empirical sense, sounds are also events and becomings in another sense, a “pure,”

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“incorporeal,” or “ideal” sense. We saw that sounds are not only “events” but “effects,” results of bodily causes that are nonetheless distinct from those causes and that have an independent existence of their own. But sounds are effects in another sense as well, in the sense in which scientists speak of the “Kelvin effect,” the “Butterfly effect,” or the “Zeeman effect” (Deleuze 1990: 7, 70, 181–2). Such descriptions refer to recurrent patterns of possibility, diffuse multiplicities that nevertheless have a coherence or consistency. The isolation or individuation of such effects is very different than that of a thing, substance, subject, or person. Deleuze calls them “haecceities,” which names a mode of individuation characteristic of events: a wind (the mistral or sirocco, for example), a river, a climate, an hour of the day, a mood, etc. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 261; cf. Deleuze 1987: 92ff, 151–2). “Effects” of this sort arise historically (hence their frequent attribution to the scientist who isolated them) but are recurrent, forming relative invariants that are irreducible to their empirical instances. This notion of “effect,” independent of cause, has a broad and important set of usages in the world of audio. Musicians use the term to refer to the distinctive timbral and textural modulations (reverb, fuzz, echo, flange, distortion, etc.) produced by electronic signal processing devices known as “effects units.” Sound researchers Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue have adopted this list of “effects” and expanded it beyond the domain of music to generate a catalogue of eighty-two “sonic effects” (effets sonores) that characterize everyday urban soundscapes: attraction, blurring, chain, dilation, fade, etc. Though inspired by Schaeffer, Augoyard and Torgue abandon Schaeffer’s “object” in favor of Deleuze’s “effect” in an effort to describe the soundscape not as a field of discrete entities but as a flux of haecceities, recurrent but transitory auditory modalities and intensities.4 An even more extravagant expansion of the notion and number of auditory effects can be found in the archives of “sound effects” employed by the radio and film industries since the 1920s. Ontologically and aesthetically, the “sound effect” is a peculiar entity. Generally anonymous, unattributed to an author or composer, these sounds are produced for

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incorporation into radio plays, films, TV shows, and video games. Yet they float free of these concrete instances, constituting a general reserve capable of use in very different productions and contexts. In films, they get attached to particular objects and situations in the image track to provide a convincing auditory complement; but they are very often generated from sources and events that have little to do with the objects or situations that receive them. (Sheets of metal produce the sound of thunder, frozen romaine lettuce generates the sound of broken bones, etc.) Moreover, sound effects are often combined with one another to generate new sound effects that diverge further from their components. These ontological and aesthetic peculiarities of sound effects have been explored by a number of artists. Working with commercial sound effects libraries, the duo Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh present these effects in their virtual state, as detached sound files indexed by titles that are at once singular and generic (“Amphibian Morph 4 From Rock to Flesh,” “Metal Squeal Huge 2.R,” “Power Buzz, invisible .R”). The sounds themselves likewise manifest this combination of the singular and the generic. Though generated by particular sources and causes, they are capable of signifying and functioning more broadly. Full Metal Jackets (2005), for example, is a sound sculpture composed of thirty-two small speakers scattered down a thirty-foot wall. A computer draws randomly from an archive of 500 sound files documenting falling bullet shell casings, and sends them to the speakers via eight different channels. At the base of the wall and facing it, a monitor lists in real time the file names, which carefully detail the type of casings and the material surfaces on which they fall. Yet, sonically, the installation is remarkably tranquil and non-violent, like a spare, aleatory percussion composition or a cascade of rain. One’s attention is drawn to the timbral and textural differences between the sounds rather than to their real-world or cinematic causal referents.5 Kubick and Walsh’s sculpture To Make the Sound of Fire (2007) similarly highlights the disjunction between source, sound, and function.6 Consisting of a Plexiglass box containing a few sheets of crumpled wax paper (used by Foley artists to generate the sound of

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fire), the silent piece invites viewers to imagine the sound such a material might make, and to compare it with their silent mental conjurings of “the sound of fire.” The infinitive title highlights the role of this and all sound effects as haecceities or singularities, elements or processes to be drawn into proximity with others in the incarnation of actual cinematic entities and events. Kubick’s recent project Hum Minus Human (2012) nicely brings together several features of the sonic ontology I have been describing.7 A single-channel video, the project presents a nearly randomized sub-catalog of drones collected by searching through a commercial sound effects archive using the keyword “hum” and subtracting those results that turn up “human” sounds. The piece freely combines the sounds of nature, culture, and industry—light transformers and cicadas, arc welders and bumble bees (etymological source of the word “drone” in English)—that form the sonic backdrop of our lives. In one sense, the “minus human” in the title simply describes a search function. But it has a broader significance as well, attuning us to that Cagean, Nietzschean, Schopenhauerian sonic flux that precedes and exceeds human being. This conception of the sonic flux—and the ontology of events and effects it affirms—is strange. It unsettles our ordinary ways of speaking, sensing, and conceiving. A philosophical aesthetics that approaches sound and music with a conceptual apparatus already in place will reject it or be deaf to it. Yet, sonic philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schaeffer, Cage, O’Callaghan, Kubick and Walsh do philosophy otherwise. Beginning from a fascination with sound, they follow it where it leads, encountering a strange world in which bodies are dissolved into flows, objects are the residues of events, and effects are unmoored from their causes to float independently as virtual powers and capacities. To think in this way is to refuse the idealist enterprise that consists in imposing philosophical concepts onto the real, subordinating the real to a set of formal syntheses taken to be ontologically distinct from it. Instead, sonic thought follows the flows of matter and energy that constitute the real, producing concepts that are themselves instances of the syntheses by which the real articulates itself.

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Notes 1 See, for example, Laruelle (2012a: 25ff ). In the context of aesthetics, see Laruelle (2012b: 3ff ). 2 Quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, §16. For more about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on music and sound, see Cox (2011: 145–61). 3 See, for example, Deleuze (1990: 4ff ), Deleuze (1987: 63–6), Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 86ff ), and Deleuze (1994: 21, 126–7, 156ff ). 4 On Deleuze’s notions of event and effect, see Augoyard and Torgue (2005: 10, 154n16). Deleuze briefly discusses “sound effects” as instances of incorporeal events in The Logic of Sense (1990: 7, 70, 181–2). 5 The project is documented at http://www.doublearchive.com/projects/ full_metal_jackets.php (accessed October 13, 2013). 6 See http://www.doublearchive.com/projects/make_sound_of_fire.php (accessed October 13, 2013). 7 An excerpt can be found at http://www.socalledsound.com (accessed October 13, 2013).

Works Cited Augoyard, J.-F. and H. Torgue, eds (2005), Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, trans. A. McCartney and D. Paquette. Montreal: McGillQueens University Press. Austin, J. L. (1962), Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bergson, H. (2007), “The Perception of Change”, in The Creative Mind. Mineola, NY: Dover. Cox, C. (2011), “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism, Journal of Visual Culture, 10(2) (August): 145–61. DeLanda, M. (1997), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone. Deleuze, G. (1987), Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Laruelle, F. (2012a), “A Summary of Non-Philosophy”, in G. Alkon and B. Gunjevic (eds), The Non-Philosophy Project. New York: Telos Press. Laruelle, F. (2012b), Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. D. S. Burk. Minneapolis: Univocal. Lippard, L. (1973), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley : University of California Press. Nietzsche, F. (1992), On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, §13, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library. O’Callaghan, C. (2007), Sounds: A Philosophical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaeffer, P. (2004), “Acousmatics”, in C. Cox and D. Warner (eds), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum. Schopenhauer, A. (1969), The World as Will and Representation, volume I, trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover.

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in|human rhythms Bernd Herzogenrath

Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat. Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle In many ways, the twentieth century can be regarded as art’s attempts to escape the “tyranny of meter” [“Tyrannei des Tactes”] (Schumann 1854: 126).1 This phrase is Robert Schumann’s, and he himself tried to free himself from that “law of metric cruelty” [“Gesetz der Tactesschwere”] (125) by ever finer and braver syncopations (see, e.g., his Kreisleriana and Kinderszenen). For the American context, Charles Ives breathes a similar sensibility. Henry and Sidney Cowell report, that “Ives’s whole approach to his complex rhythms should be understood as an attempt to persuade players away from the straitjacket of regular beats, with which complete exactness is impossible anyhow” (Cowell and Cowell 1955: 172). Instead, the performance should strive for a “variety of rhythmic tensions and muscular stresses that make constant slight changes of pace” (ibid. 173)—Ives’s “Over the Pavements” may serve as an example here. It might be argued, though (as, e.g., Saxer does), that all these Modernist attempts to evade what Nabokov has called the “miserable measurement of time” (1969: 538) are still marching (in relation to) a steady beat, be it in their scores (which still betray an adherence to “traditional notation”), be it in ever more adventurous deviations from that pulse (see, e.g., Messiaen’s “added value rhythms,” “symmetrical permutations,” “non-retrogradable rhythms,” etc.). 111

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So, is there a way to think rhythm otherwise? For Deleuze and Guattari, the “tyranny of meter” is related to it being a non-productive (or only reproductive) and thus empty periodicity, a static repetition that does not produce difference, a difference they relate to becoming: “Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a non-communicating milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 313). Metric repetition is thus the repetition of the identical, creating equal units of time, whereas rhythm—real productive repetition, repetition with a difference— involves inequalities, maybe non-linear logics: intensities that create “incommensurabilities between metric equivalent periods or spaces” (Deleuze 1994: 21). These equivalent metrical periods are what clock-time consists of— as Frank Kermode has so beautifully put it in his The Sense of an Ending, “[t]he clock’s ‘tick-tock’ I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organisation which humanises time by giving it a form; and the interval between ‘tock’ and ‘tick’ represents purely successive, disorganised time of the sort we need to humanise” (Kermode 1967: 45). The disorganized time “in between,” the non-pulsed “time in its pure state” (Deleuze 1989: xi) is thus what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhythm.2 According to Deleuze and Guattari, as they outline in their Plateau “On the Refrain,” rhythm and the refrain are closely connected to a certain territory and geography, and simultaneously to the forces of deterritorialization, and of becoming. In turn becoming itself is closely connected to a notion of geography—“[b]ecomings belong to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exit” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 2). Deleuze’s concept of “history as becoming” thus reveals a close proximity to the “geohistory” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 95) of Fernand Braudel—“[g]eography wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility of contingency” (ibid.: 96). With the concept of longue durée, Braudel commented on the “geographic aspects” of (historical) time itself. According to Braudel

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(1982: 74), “[h]istory exists at different levels, I would even go so far as to say three levels but that would be simplifying things too much.” History—thus Braudel, thus Deleuze—happens at ten, at a hundred levels and time spans [at a thousand plateaus] simultaneously. This coexistent and dynamic becoming is to the static succession of being what locus is to datum, space is to time, and in analogy regards “geography as opposed to history, the rhizome as opposed to arborescence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 296). History is a rhizome that historiography aims at translating into an arborescent order, with the rhizome standing for the complex interplay of necessity and chance, human and non-human, culture and materiality, intention and self-organization. This notion of geohistory corresponds to a perspective on rhythm of one of the profoundest “escape artists” of the metric tyranny—Olivier Messiaen. In a dialogue with the internationally renowned organist and interpreter of Messiaen’s organ works Almut Rößler, Messiaen puts forward a “time-philosophical” notion of rhythms: What could be more useful for a musician to create a link between movement and change . . . Of even greater significance, however, will be an awareness of time-scales, superimposed on each other, which surrounds us: the endlessly long time of the stars, the very long time of the mountains, the middling one of the human being, the short one of insects, the very short one of atoms (not to mention the time-scales inherent in ourselves—the physiological, the psychological). Whenever the composer sets the tempo-change machine going, he’ll become conscious of these different slownesses, these different quicknesses. Rößler 1986: 40

Deleuze and Guattari’s own concept of rhythm (and of the refrain) owes much to Messiaen’s experimentations. When Messiaen refers to the composer’s “tempo-change-machine,” he basically talks about a synchronization of nature (that other tempo-change machine) and the composer’s activity. Even if Messiaen’s notion of nature still smacks of a transcendental concept (a God-centered harmonious kosmos), one can easily see how Deleuze and Guattari adapt that idea and relate it to their

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machinic conception of nature. Nature thus becomes un-natural, in-human—machinic. From such a perspective, Messiaen’s (and also Braudel’s) classification of different time-scales and time-spans relates to a notion of the in|human that I want to discuss here in connection to three different composers and works. What I would like to call in|human corresponds to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “inhuman” reading of the term “inhuman,” which “signifies ‘not human,’ of course, and therefore includes a world of forces, objects and nonhuman beings. But in-human also indicates the alien within (any human body is an ecosystem filled with strange objects)” (Cohen 2014: 271)—a materialist, anti“human”istic perspective that sees “the human” inextricably connected to and even emerging from in|human forces. In the following, I would like to discuss three instances of in|human rhythms in works of John Luther Adams, David Dunn, and Richard Reed Parry, carefully heeding Deleuze’s advice to not see this endeavor as “a matter of setting philosophy to music, or vice versa,” but rather as “one thing folding into another” (Deleuze 1995: 163).

in|human rhythms: the longue durée of the earth John Luther Adams—The Place Where You Go to Listen John Luther Adams is a contemporary composer who lives and works in Fairbanks, Alaska, approximately 125 miles south of the Arctic.3 Adams’s work is highly influenced by his environment, this “hyperborean zone, far from the temperate regions” (Deleuze 1997: 82), far from equilibrium. From his early works onwards he has always pointed out that he wants his music to be understood as an interaction with nature—as a site-specific “contact” with the environment that he calls “sonic geography” (Adams 1994: 8). Adams’s sonic geography comprises a cycle called songbirdsongs (1974–1980), consisting of various imitations of Alaskan birds

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reminiscent of Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogues d’oiseaux. Although Adams in the compositional process and the transcription brings birdsong on a “human scale” in terms of tempo, modulation, pitch, etc., he conceptualizes the different melodies—or “refrains”—as a “toolkit,” so that during the performance, an ever-new aggregation of phrases and motifs comes into existence, an open system, indetermined in combination, length, intonation, tempi, etc. Earth and the Great Weather (1990–1993), an evening-long piece—or opera—consisting of field recordings of wind, melting glaciers, thunder in combination with ritual drummings and chants of the Alaskan indigenous people, was “conceived as a journey through the physical, cultural and spiritual landscapes of the Arctic” (Adams 1998a). In a further step, Adams combined his “sonic geography” with the concept of what he calls “sonic geometry” (Adams 1998b: 143). Adams is more and more interested in the “noisier” sounds of nature and refers to findings of Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry in order to find sonic equivalents for nature’s modus operandi—Strange and Sacred Noise (1991–1997) is an example of this approach.4 To date, the culmination of Adams’s sonic geography|geometry has been his recent project The Place Where You Go to Listen, the title of which refers to an Inuit legend according to which the shamans hear the wisdom of the world in [and get their knowledge from] the whisper of the wind and the murmur of the waves, being sensitive to what Deleuze, with reference to Leibniz, calls “little perceptions” (Deleuze 1994: 213).5 Adams aims at the realization of a “musical ecosystem, . . . A work of art . . . that is directly connected to the real world in which we live and resonates sympathetically with that world and with the forces of nature” (Adams 2006b)—Adams does not only imitate nature in its manner of operation, like Cage still does, he taps into nature’s dynamic processes themselves for the generation of sound and light. Adams developed this project in close collaboration with geologists and physicists—as Adams stated in an interview, “[a]t a certain level, it was like . . . they were the boys in the band” (Adams 2015).

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In Adams’s installation, real time data from meteorological stations all over Alaska and from the five stations of the Alaska Earthquake Information Center are collected, coordinated, and made audible through pink noise filters. As Curt Szuberla, one of the physicists involved in the project, explains, “[t]he strings and bells and drumheads are plucked, bashed and banged based on the geophysical data streams. And the geophysical data streams . . . are the fingers and mallets and bells that hit things and make things sound” (Adams 2015). The Place Where You Go to Listen is a permanent installation at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, where sound and light are generated in real time through data processing of the day and night rhythms, the rhythms of the seasons, of the moon phases, the weather conditions, and the seismic flows of the magnetic field of the Earth—nature itself, as well as the music it produces, operates according to its own times and speeds (and slownesses). Hours, even days (and more) might pass between perceivable seismic changes or changes in the magnetic field of the Earth. The Place is an open system, a machinic aggregation operating according to what Deleuze calls “differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity” (Deleuze 1994: 222)—just like the weather. Adams’s noisefilter-machine is plugged into the sun-machine, and also into the windmachine, rain-machine, etc. These in turn couple together to form the weather-machine—different milieus, different rhythms resonate with each other. Digital machines cut into the flows of nature, but within a machine|nature ecology|ontology which is not based on the strict separation of these two spheres, where nature is either a fixed, unchanging essence, or the mere retro-effect of culture and representation, but an ecology|ontology of dynamics and production. Adams’s installation thus presents “modes of individuation beyond those of things, persons or subjects: the individuation, say, of a time of day, of a region, a climate” (Deleuze 1995: 26). The Place Where You Go to Listen focuses on nature as process and event—in an almost Stoic emphasis on becoming versus being, Adams privileges time-sensitive dynamics, not clear-cut states. In his study La théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoicisme, to which Deleuze refers in

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Logic of Sense, Emile Bréhier states that, according to Stoic thought, “one should not say, ‘the tree is green,’ but ‘the tree greens’ . . . what is expressed in this proposition is not a property, such as ‘a body is hot,’ but an event, such as ‘a body becomes hot’ ” (Bréhier 1970: 20–1).6 This becoming, writes Deleuze, passes the line “between the sensible and the intelligible, or between the soul and the body” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 63)—or nature and culture—and places itself “[b]etween things and events” (ibid.). By getting rid of the is of representational thought, where an object’s quality is at least potentially related to a subject that expresses this quality as an attribute, by replacing fixity with process as both the subject’s and the world’s manner of operation, these “infinitivebecomings have no subject: they refer only to an ‘it’ of the event” (ibid.: 64). Adams’s installation goes further in the direction of the event than Ives and even Cage—although these two composers had also already pondered the conflict between the processuality of nature, and the means of art. Ives asked himself: “A painter paints a sunset—can he paint the setting sun? . . . [Is] [t]here . . . an analogy . . . between both the state and power of artistic perceptions and the law of perpetual change, that ever-flowing stream, partly biological, partly cosmic, ever going on in ourselves, in nature, in all life?” (Ives 1999: 71). Ives tried to master these problematics by way of the ever increasing complexification of his compositorial means. Cage also emphasized that he did not think it correct to say “the world as it is”—“it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It doesn’t wait for us to change . . . it is more mobile than you can imagine. You’re getting closer to this reality when you say as it ‘presents itself;’ that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The world, the real is not an object. It is a process” (Cage 1981: 80). But Ives was still the subject in control of chaos, and Cage, in spite of all indeterminacy, regretted that he was still creating “clear-cut” objects. Adams solves this problem by leaving the executing|processing energy to the processual forces of nature itself. Music and environment thus become an ecosystem of a dynamics of acoustic and optic resonances interacting in|with an environment in constant flux. “Music” in this

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sense thus for Adams becomes something entirely different than a “means” of human communication about an external world: “If music grounded in tone is a means of sending messages to the world, then music grounded in noise is a means of receiving messages from the world. . . . As we listen carefully to noise, the whole world becomes music. Rather than a vehicle for self-expression, music becomes a mode of awareness” (Adams 2006a). Thus, The Place Where You Go to Listen leaves the conceptualization of a music about nature, of music as a means of the representation of nature and landscape, on which, e.g., Ives still relied, and creates music as a part of nature, as coextensive with the environment—“Through attentive and sustained listening to the resonances of this place, I hope to make music which belongs here, somewhat like the plants and the birds” (Adams 1994: 8). Even more direct than Cage, Adams emphasizes nature’s “manner of operation” in not only taking it as a model, but by directly “accessing” and relating to the becoming of a site-specific environment and creating works that are this relation—a music of place, of a place where you go to listen. In this work, then, rhythm consists in the interpenetrating longue durées of cosmic milieus and seismic forces—the Place Where You Go to Listen emerges out of “an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of both). It is a tactile space, or rather ‘haptic,’ a sonorous much more than a visual space” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 421). Deleuze and Guattari are referring to an ice desert here, but their notion of haecceity also describes Adams’s installation very well: A season, a winter, a summer, a time of day, a date have a perfect individuality that lacks nothing, even though it can’t be confused with that of a thing or a subject. These are haecceities, in the sense that everything about them is a relationship of movement and rest between molecules or particles, the power to affect and to be affected. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 261

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in|human rhythms: becoming-insect David Dunn—“Chaos and the Emerging Mind of the Pond ” From the longue durée of Adams, the “endlessly long time of the stars” (Rößler 1986: 40), we move further (down? the scale?) to the “short one of insects” (ibid.), exemplified in the work of David Dunn. In 1935, the naturalist Hugh M. Smith observed the following spectacle in Thailand: Imagine a tree thirty-five to forty feet high thickly covered with small ovate leaves, apparently with a firefly on every leaf, and all the fireflies flashing in perfect unison at the rate of about three times in two seconds, the tree being in complete darkness between flashes . . . Imagine a tenth of a mile of river front with an unbroken line of Sonnerati trees with fireflies on every leaf flashing in synchronism, the trees at the ends of the line acting in perfect union with those between. Then, if one’s imagination is vivid, he may form some conception of this amazing spectacle. Smith 1935: 151

Smith marveled at this unexplainable wonder—surely, these insects did not possess intelligence that made them intentionally flash in unison? It seems that this spectacle (which is still popular today, e.g. as a tourist attraction in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park) attracted lots of observers and commentators who published their responses in the journal Science in the early twentieth century. As one commentator put it: If it is desired to get a body of men to sing or play together in perfect rhythm they not only must have a leader but must be trained to follow such a leader. Imagine the difficulty of keeping together on ‘Old Hundred’ if the notes were started with an interval so long as six or nine seconds between each. Do these insects inherit a sense of rhythm more perfect than our own? Hudson 1918: 574

The question of how to keep a rhythm without a maestro, conductor or click-track puzzled the naturalists and scientists. Today, it seems that

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the answer to all this is the concept of emergence, self-organization and spontaneous order. In fact, as Hudson already pointed out, the fireflies—or crickets, for that matter, where the emitted signal is not light, but sound—do not perfectly harmonize, unison is not total, but interspersed with slight variations, accelerandos, ritardandos, and stringendos, etc.: “[s]trictly speaking, there was no measured regularity in this response and therefore no true rhythm . . . There was present the influence of suggestion on what may be called a ‘mob-psychology,’ but there was no special leader” (Hudson 1918: 573). In their slightly out-of-sync, non-linear unison, the insects—no matter if fireflies or cicada—are monitoring their collective boundaries rather than individual insects establishing breeding fitness. Now, with these sounds we enter what Deleuze and Guattari call the “refrain.” Taking their cue from their analysis of birdsong (which already shows the more cosmic vision in which they locate their concepts of “rhythm” and “refrain” and which they do not connect to music alone), Deleuze and Guattari state that a refrain is “any kind of rhythmic pattern that stakes out a territory” (Bogue 2003: 17). And even if Deleuze and Guattari take birdsong as a primary example, the same relation of song and rhythm to territory can also be seen in “human music”—the deçî-tâlas (the 120 Hindu rhythms), the Greek Σνρτóς (Sirtos), the Delta Blues, New Orleans Jazz, or East Coast versus West Coast Hip Hop. The refrain thus is a territorial marker that is always open to its surrounding milieus, which are constituted by different rhythms—rhythm itself is thus the difference between milieus, with chaos being the “milieu of all milieus” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 313). Chaos thus is the pool of the virtuality of rhythms, out of which rhythmic patterns emerge in a self-organizing manner. David Dunn is a sound artist, ecologist, and researcher who is both interested in “the natural world” (and its sounds), as he is in science and complexity theory. In fact, quite a lot of his work can be considered “artistic research” in that it is based on active collaborations with scientists, e.g. complexity theorist James Crutchfield.

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In his work “Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond” (1991), Dunn had entered the acoustic world of underwater-life. He recorded the sound of aquatic insects in ponds in New Mexico and Africa, thus fusing insect-rhythms of different milieus and territories. In this underwater world, Dunn “hears a rhythmic complexity altogether greater than that in most human music” (Raffles 2010: 323). In fact, Dunn’s work accomplishes a twist on the standard musique concrète aesthetics and ideology. Whereas in the objet sonore the identification of the sound’s origin was to remain concealed, Dunn on the one hand keeps the representational level of the sound, he wants it to be identified as “something in|of the world,” but on the other hand he also stresses the uncanniness of these sounds: While the sounds above water are comfortable and familiar, those occuring [sic] under the surface are shocking. Their alien variety seems unprecedented as if controlled by a mysterious but urgent logic. The minutiae which produce these audible rasps and sputters remain mostly unseen amongst the tentacles of plants and layers of silt but each contributes to a sonic multiverse of exquisite complexity. The timbres of these sounds are obviously magnificent, a tiny orchestra of homemade percussion seemingly intoxicated by the infinite diversity of audible colors, but what strikes my ears most readily are the rhythmic structures. . . . Amid a background hum of distant chatter the persistent clicks of several different insects pulsate. Many of these sounds are continuous but elastic, their constancy appears sensitive to the assertions of others. This fabric is punctuated by the intermittent cries of something unseen or the wheezing of larger beetles carrying their air supply between their legs. Steady state bands of sawtooth resonance waft across the distance between schools of insect thought that together form an emergent cognition. This infinitessimal [sic] world seems complete. Dunn 1992

Dunn’s piece is both field recording, composition, and, first of all, a transposition to a human scale of those sounds which are “below the radar,” inaudible to the human ear—it takes special technology (in this

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case, omnidirectional hydrophones) to pick up these patterns, frequencies, rhythms. By fusing different rhythmic refrains (of different insect ecologies and milieus) Dunn is trying to reflect “in the mix” what he estimated the most striking feature of that underwater invertebrate communication—he basically faces a super-organism, and, ultimately, a consciousness: [T]here are these emergent rhythms, these elastic pulsations of life, sounding as if the very morphology of these little beings and the pond’s macro body were dependent upon this aquatic jazz for the maintenance of time and space: primal drummers collectively engaged in the creation of worlds through jamming together the stridulatory resonance of their viscera. This is a dance between periodicity and chaotic swirl, the expansion and contraction of momentary selfresonance within the mutuality of mind. . . . Perhaps the complexity of these tiny rhythmic entrainments and chaotic cycles of microcosmic heart beats hover around that basin of attraction known as thought and together bring into being an awareness which I cannot fathom. The placidity of the water’s surface takes on the sense of a membrane enclosing a collective intelligence. I know that this is not a rational thought but I find it to be irresistible. Dunn 1992:

In a mode strongly reminiscent of Whitehead or Bateson, Dunn asserts: My direct experience of nature convinces me that the worlds I hear are saturated with an intelligence emergent from the very fullness of interconnection which sustains them. . . . To assert that human consciousness, arising out of a network of material interactions similar to those which give rise to the very existence of all life, is more important than other forms of mind not operating within the human linguistic domain is absurd. Dunn 1992:

Dunn’s description of the alien sounds (clicks, sawtooth) is reminiscent of computer music (Dunn is a pioneer of electronic music himself). And indeed, Achim Szepanski, former owner and founder of the labels Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux, has explained that in Techno, “you can

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hear a multitude of noises, shrieks, chirps, creaks, and whizzes. These are all sounds traditionally associated with madness. . . . Techno in this sense is schizoid music” (quoted in Anz and Walder 1995: 140–41). For Deleuze|Guattari, these sounds point towards a becoming-insect, towards a molecular deterritorialization of the territorializing refrains of birdsong: the reign of birds seems to have been replaced by the age of insects, with its much more molecular vibrations, chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching, and scraping. Birds are vocal, but insects are instrumental: drums and violins, guitars and cymbals. A becominginsect has replaced becoming-bird, or forms a block with it. The insect is closer, better able to make audible the truth that all becomings are molecular. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3087

In his sonic becoming-insect[s], then, Dunn deterritorializes the territorial refrains of different insects in order to make expressive the concept that everything is connected, and that mind—or consciousness— is not a human quale, but the multiplicity of virtual connections, intraand interspecies, human and non-human: in|human.

in|human rhythms: the cardiac and respiration system Richard Reed Parry—Music for Heart and Breath In 1988, the Swedish Pop duo Roxette issued a double command to everybody willing to obey—they not only released their second studio album Look Sharp!, the album also featured their hit single “Listen To Your Heart.” The lyrics of this song show that to listen to one’s heart equals to listen to your feelings, emotions, to the cultured expertise of one who “truly loves”—and all this in 86 bpm. The mathematical/ metronomic indication of beats per minute seemingly correlates the musical metrum with a bodily, organic function—that of the heartbeat. From this perspective, Roxette’s 86 bpm is in a significant mismatch

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with the emotional state this song talks about—nothing excited/exciting about this measure, a bpm number of 60 to 100 signifies regular heart activity, while with 120 bpm we enter zones of excitation. But 86 bpm relates rather to a state of sitting on the couch than of emotional turmoil—it thus rather follows the standard rules and conventions of a soft rock ballad, of a cultural refrain, that is. What is even more important—the cardiogenic mimesis of the bpmsystem is in itself already a stabilization of a more chaotic rhythmic milieu, an abstraction. Consider the following quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: We are lovers of rhyme and return, period and musical reflection. The babe is lulled to sleep by the nurse’s song. Sailors can work better for their yo-heave-o. Soldiers can march better and fight better for the drum and trumpet. Metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs. If you hum or whistle the rhythm of the common English metres,—of the decasyllabic quatrain, or the octosyllabic with alternate sexisyllabic, or other rhythms, you can easily believe these metres to be organic, derived from the human pulse, and to be therefore not proper to one nation, but to mankind. Emerson 1875: 41–2

Emerson here clearly locates the origin of rhythm (in poetry, in music, etc.) in the organic movements of walking and heartbeat (in close d’accord with the fact that much of (post)Transcendentalist Poetry was structured not by the metrics of “good poetry,” but determined by the length of breath). However—it is meter he is talking about, not rhythm. English meters and the marching rhythm are in fact no rhythms at all—Messiaen complained about this, and Deleuze and Guattari followed—“there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march” (1987: 313). Meter thus is revealed as a territorializing refrain, a stabilization and regulation of the different rhythmic chaotic milieus of the human body. Thus, if you actually listen to your heart, you will not get a clean bpm-structure, but something more chaotic, more non-linear.

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“As animals our lives are marked by rhythms, and the rhythmical activities of ventilation and heart beat are tangible evidence of the life force in each of us” (Taylor et al. 1999: 900). But what about the “subtle processes of generation, regulation, and integration of these internal rhythms” (ibid.)? Meter—marches, sonnets, bpm, Roxette—are linear systems, and linear systems are well-behaved. Because of their regular repetition of identical patterns, they can be completely understood and even predicted—by dissecting them into their components, which always add up. Non-linear systems, on the other hand, do not add up—dissection will not work here, because the components are coupled, looped, involved in emergent processes. The research on the seeming synchronicity of crickets and fireflies, mentioned in the section on David Dunn, is also interesting because cardiac pacemaker cells function in a similar manner—the heart beats in a non-linear way, with subtle but complex fluctuations. Indeed, a completely regular heartbeat in homeostasis might signify illness, while the slightly chaotic fluctuations might indicate a healthy state8 (with the flat-line as both the point zero and point of infinity of metric regularity). The same, one might argue, goes for the respiratory system, and, in addition, these two systems are not only interdependent, but also coupled to hormonal and chemical stimuli (in|human here with the stress on “in” as an inclusive preposition),external excitations: a myriad of interconnected internal, external, intermediate, etc. rhythmic milieus, “differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity” (Deleuze 1994: 222)—so much for your bpm. So, how if one TAKE s THAT as a “rhythmic template”? Enter Richard Reed Parry. The multi-instrumentalist of your favorite Indie-Rock-Band Arcade Fire is also a classically trained musician and composer, who fearlessly and successfully straddles the two worlds of Pop and Classical—a tightrope-act he shares with the likes of Bryce Dessner (The National), Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) and Glen Kotche (Wilco). Parry’s Music for Heart and Breath (2014) listens to one’s heart in a mode very different from Roxette’s. With the musicians of these pieces

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wearing stethoscopes, “the concept for the entire record . . . is that every note and everything that any of the musicians plays is played either in sync with the heartbeat of that player or with their breathing or with the breathing of another player. And it depends piece-to-piece what exactly is happening” (Parry 2014a).9 Referring to the influence of Cage, Reich, and Eno that Parry cites in his “Liner Notes,” one could say that Music for Heart and Breath ingeniously combines Cage’s indeterminism, Reich’s phasing, and Eno’s idea of Generative Music. But I’d argue there is more to Parry’s very singular way of trying to escape from the tyranny of meter. The players of Music for Heart and Breath have to listen to their own bodily rhythms as well as to those of their co-players, while at the same time external stimuli (responses of the audience) and internal stimuli (excitation of the players, the feedback-loop of responding to responses, etc.) further destabilize the rhythmics of the piece being played. Parry’s compositions attempt to “translate directly into music the quiet internal rhythms of the body . . . to guide and shape the dynamics of the pieces . . . following the subtly rhythmic ‘instructions’ of the body” (Parry 2014b: 6)—we need to add, though, that because of the complex feedback loops mentioned, we cannot be speaking of “internal rhythms” alone, rather of rhythms situated at the fold of inside|outside. The musicians body thus becomes a pivotal instrument in the performance— the body, that according to commentators from Roland Barthes to noted American jazz pianist and composer Yijay Iyer has always been suppressed in (cultural constructivist or semiotic) interpretations of music. Consider Barthes’ love for Schumann. Listening to Schumann’s Kreisleriana (Opus 16, 1838), Barthes claims that he does not hear notes, themes, or even meaning—“I hear this body that beats” (1991: 299). However, interpretations and performances of that beating body that Barthes hears—“there is no beating except the heart’s” (1991: 302)—are rendered too docile, in general, those beats are played “too timidly; the body which takes possession of them is almost always a mediocre body, trained, streamlined by years of Conservatory or career,

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or, more simply by the interpreter’s insignificance, his indifference” (1991: 303). For Parry’s Music for Heart and Breath, it takes an interpreter not indifferent to the differences in intensity that the beating heart provides. Barthes’ description of the “mediocre” and streamlined Conservatory player, a highly trained technician of music, might be described in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms as a “paranoiac performer.” For Deleuze|Guattari, the body ultimately oscillates between two poles, “the paranoiac, reactionary, and fascizising pole, and the schizoid revolutionary pole” (1992: 366). It is important to point out that, despite the origin of the terms “paranoiac” and “schizoid” in psychoanalysis, Deleuze|Guattari have chosen the terms to refer to different logics and dynamics of social organization. Whereas paranoia designates an Oedipal and ultimately transcendental mode of a hierarchically structured and rigidly segmented, striated, and solid body, controlled by an external authority, schizophrenia marks liberating potentialities and “lines of flight,” vectors of deterritorialization, a fluid body constituted by openness, dynamics, self-organization, and by a constant “becoming.” Thus, while the “paranoiac performer” is Maestro or clicktrack fixated, what Music for Heart and Breath calls for is indeed a “schizzo performer,” open to the irregular dynamics of his own body, to rhythms that are not metric and solid (“Solid as a Rock”), but fluid and marked by intensive differences.10 The headline of the NPR interview with Arun Rath claims that “Richard Reed Parry Turns Musicians into Metronomes”—which in fact he does not: the irregular rhythms of heart and breath provide anything but stable metric regularity, the effect is rather a stuttering. Deleuze has related the concepts of “stammering” and “stuttering” to the question of style. And even though he mostly related stuttering to the realm of literature, I argue that stuttering bears a close affinity to the ideas of “rhythm” and “rhizome.” Taking his cue from Proust, Deleuze claims that “great literature is written in a kind of foreign language” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 5). To write or speak in a foreign language is to write and speak in a minor and deterritorialized language, escaping

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the solidified and molarized variables, variations, potentialities— virtualities—of any major language, making any “language” (literal, symbolic, music) “affective and intensive” (Deleuze 1997: 107). It is this deterritorializing and rhizomatic quality that links the idea of stuttering to the rhythmic complexities of Music for Heart and Breath—Rhizome is a Dancer! In their various attempts to escape from the “tyranny of meter,” Adams, Dunn, and Parry have also commented on what might be called “Music in the Age of the Anthropocene.” With the idea of the human becoming a geological (i.e. non-human) force itself, art has the responsibility to create an awareness of how we live not only in the world, but also as part of that world. A music that “performs” these “cosmic dimensions” of the interdependence of human and non-human, by focusing on the in|human of the concept “human” might also teach us something in regard to artistic (or musical) form—form as a molar concept tied to the intentionality of a subject that in|forms brute matter: [t]here is no longer a form, but only relations of velocity between infinitesimal particles of an unformed material. There is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an anonymous force. Here the plan is concerned only with motions and rests, with dynamic affective charges. Deleuze 1988: 128

These rhythmic “relations of velocity” ultimately reveal rhythm as the in|human non-linear pulsation of life—“a life”—that escapes conscious control and the all-too-human “tyranny of meter.”

Notes 1 See also Saxer (2004). 2 Deleuze refers to the Proustian idea of “time in its pure state” also on his IRCAM Seminar on music (Deleuze 1978)—hence, a vague correspondence between meter—movement-image and rhythm—timeimage might be proposed.

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3 Adams, it has to be noted, is also an environmental activist and founder of Alaska’s Green Party. Mitchell Morris thus dubs Adams a “ ‘Green’ composer” (1998: 131), referring, however, to the notion of ecology as in Deep Ecology, whereas I would suggest to place Adams firmly within a Deleuzian Ecology that is based on a non-dualist ontology. 4 Strange and Sacred Noise is a concert-length cycle of six movements for percussion quartet. Its first and last movements (“. . . dust into dust . . .” and “. . . and dust rising . . .”) are based on the Cantor set and Cantor dust (the two-dimensional version of the Cantor set). These fractals model the behavior of electrical noise, which Adams takes as a diagram for the percussion set to explore “the dynamic form of the Cantor dust, whereby in an infinite process, line segments are divided into two segments by the removal of their middle third” (Feisst n.d.). See also Feisst (2001: 4–14). 5 A direct Leibnizian reference can be found in his New Essays on Human Understanding: “To hear this noise as we do, we must hear the parts which make up this whole, that is the noise of each wave, although each of these little noises makes itself known only when combined confusedly with all the others, and would not be noticed if the wave which made it were by itself . . . [w]e must have some perception of each of these noises, however faint they may be; otherwise there would be no perception of a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand nothings cannot make something” (Leibniz 1996: 55). Such a “sonorous ocean,” it can be argued, the becoming-perceptible of micro-sounds “underneath the [human] radar,” also provides a more materialist version of the Pythagorean idea of “sphere music”: contrary to a the harmonious universe rotating according to “well-tempered” intervals, it would refer to the multiplicity of sounds of “the world”—nature changes constantly, everything moves, and everything that moves oscillates according to a certain frequency, the total result of which would be white noise (the murmur of the universe). Such a concept, I argue, also defines much of today’s electronic music (see, e.g., Murphy 2004, in particular 161–2). Lately, Adams has transferred the sound of the little waves that make up a sonorous body of water in his Pulitzer-Prize awarded Becoming Ocean (2014). 6 My translation of: “On ne doit pas dire, pensaient-ils: ‘L’arbre est vert,’ mais: ‘L’arbre verdoie’ . . . Ce qui s’exprime dans le jugement, ce n’est pas une propriété comme: un corps est chaud, mais une èvénement comme: un corps s’échauffe.”

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7 Compare with Deleuze|Guattari who point out that “a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial or assemblage refrain, in order to transform it from within, deterritorialized, producing a refrain of the second type as the final end of music: the cosmic refrain of a sound machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 349). 8 See Goldberger et al. (1990). 9 This concept had already been put to use by American composer Christopher Shultis in his 1994 piece “Written on the body, for musicians and dancers,” where the musicians “have a contact microphone attached to any part of the body that produces an audible heartbeat. This is amplified into an earpiece that is placed into the musician’s other ear.” 10 See also Szekely (2003) for a somewhat similar observation.

Works cited Adams, J. L. (1994), “Resonance of Place.” The North American Review CCLXXIX : 1 (Jan/Feb) 8–18. Adams, J. L. (1998a), “Sonic Geography of the Arctic. An Interview with Gayle Young.” Available online: http://www.johnlutheradams.com/interview/ gayleyoung.html (accessed July 8, 2015). Adams, J. L. (1998b), “Strange and Sacred Noise,” Yearbook of Soundscape Studies. Vol. 1: “Northern Soundscapes.” R. M. Schafer and H. Järviluoma (eds). Tampere, 143–6. Adams, J. L. (2006a), “In Search of an Ecology of Music.” Available online: http:// www.johnlutheradams.com/writings/ecology.html (accessed July 8, 2015). Adams, J. L. (2006b), quoted in A. Mayer, “Northern Exposure: A museum exhibit converts activity in the Alaskan environment into an ever changing sound show,” Boston Globe, April 16, 2006. Adams, J. L. (2015), quoted in Living On Earth, radio interview with A. Mayer. Available online: www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID =06-P1300016&segmentID =5 (accessed July 8, 2015). Anz, P. and P. Walder, eds (1995), Techno. Zürich: Verlag Ricco Bilger. Barthes, R. (1991), “Rasch”, The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. R. Howard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 299–312.

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Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts. London and New York: Routledge. Braudel, F. (1982), “History and Sociology”, On History, trans. S. Matthews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 64–82. Bréhier, E. (1970), La théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoicisme. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. Cage, J. (1981), For the Birds. John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. Boston and London: Marion Boyars. Cohen, J. J., ed. (2014), “Grey”, Prismatic Ecology. Ecotheory Beyond Green. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 270–89. Cowell, H. and S. Cowell (1955), Charles Ives and His Music, Oxford: Oxford UP. Deleuze, G. (1978), “IRCAM Conference Presentation on Musical Time”, trans. T. Murphy. Available online: www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php? cle=113&groupe=Conf%E9rences&langue=2(accessed July 8, 2015). Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1992), Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (1987), Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press. Dunn, D. (1992), Liner notes to “Chaos and the Emerging Mind of the Pond”, Angels and Insects, CD, Santa Fe: What Next? Recordings.

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Emerson, R. W. (1875), “Poetry and Imagination”, Letters and Social Aims. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 9–64. Feisst, S. M. (2001), “Klanggeographie–Klanggeometrie. Der US -amerikanische Komponist John Luther Adams”, MusikTexte 91 (November): 4–14. Feisst, S. M. (n.d.), “Music as Place, Place as Music. The Sonic Geography of John Luther Adams” (unpublished manuscript). Goldberger, A. L., et al. (1990), “Chaos and Fractals in Human Physiology. Chaos in Bodily Functioning Signals Health–Periodic Behavior Can Foreshadow Disease”, Scientific American 262: 42–9. Hudson, G. H. (1918), “Concerted Flashing of Fireflies”, Science 48 (1249): 573–5. Ives, C. (1999), Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings, H. Boatwright (ed.). New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Iyer, V. (2002), “Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive Microtiming”, Music Perception 19(3):387–414. Kermode, F. (1967), The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leibniz, G. W. (1996), New Essays on Human Understanding, P. Remnant and J. Bennett (eds and trans.), 2nd Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Morris, M. (1998), “Ectopian Sound or The Music of John Luther Adams and Strong Environmentalism”, in P. F. Broman et al. (eds), Crosscurrents and Counterpoints. Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet, 129–41. Murphy, T. S. (2004), “What I Hear is Thinking Too: The Deleuze Tribute Recordings”, in I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 159–75. Nabokov, V. (1969), Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill. Parry, R. R. (2014a), “Richard Reed Parry Turns Musicians into Metronomes”, Interview with NPR . Available online: http://www.npr.org/templates/ transcript/transcript.php?storyId=330688722 (accessed September 15, 2015). Parry, R. R. (2014b), Liner Notes to “Music for Heart and Breath”, CD, Deutsche Grammophon. Raffles, H. (2010), Insectopedia. New York: Vintage Books. Rößler, A. (1986), Contributions to the Spiritual World of Olivier Messiaen. With Original Texts by the Composer, trans. B. Dagg and N. Poland. Duisburg: Gilles & Francke.

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Saxer, M. (2004), “Die Emanzipation von der metrischen Zeitordnung–eine Utopie? Zeitkonzeptionen in der Musik nach 1945”, in P. Primavesi and S. Mahrenholz (eds), Geteilte Zeit. Zur Kritik des Rhythmus in den Künsten. Schliengen: edition Argus, 52–70. Schumann, R. (1854), Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker Bd.1. Leipzig: Georg Wigand’s Verlag, 125–6. Shultis, C. (2011), “Written on the body, for musicians and dancers (1994)”, Experimental Music and Writings (1988–1994). American Composers Alliance, New York, n.p. Smith, H. M. (1935), “Synchronous Flashing of Fireflies”, Science 82(2129): 151–2. Szekely, M. (2003), “Becoming-Still. Perspectives on Musical Ontology after Deleuze and Guattari”, Social Semiotics 13(2): 113–28. Szuberla, C. (2006), quoted in Living On Earth, radio interview with A. Mayer. Available online: www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID =06-P1300016&segmentID =5 (accessed July 8, 2015). Taylor, E., et al. (1999), “Central Control of the Cardiovascular and Respiratory Systems and Their Interactions in Vertebrates”, Physiological Reviews 79(3): 855–916.

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Sound Without Organs: Inhuman Refrains and the Speculative Potential of a Cosmos-Without-Us Jessie Beier and Jason Wallin

A day before the scheduled landing of its probe on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta recorded a mysterious signal emanating from the extraterrestrial object (O’Neill 2014). Registering a low frequency oscillating signal in the 40–50 millihertz range,1 mission scientists concluded that Comet 67P was “singing.” Accelerated 10,000 times for human audibility, this “song” has been likened to the ambient works of Sigur Rós, the absurdist pop of Bjork, or more remotely, the trilling of Hollywood’s hunter-alien Predators (Coplan 2014). Correlates aside, the electromagnetic sonority of Comet 67P registered by Rosetta poses something far weirder in its manifestation of an occulted cosmic sensibility.2 More specifically, the singing of Comet 67P not only suggests a “sonority” beyond the geospatial and temporal territories of “man,” but of an inhuman improvisation of dust, ice, and planetary bodies antithetical to the philosophical conceit that reality exists as it does for a human subject (Thacker 2011, 2015a, 2015b). As scientists have discovered, Comet 67P is not the only object “singing” against the abyss of deep space. Numerous probes including NASA’s Voyager have recorded the electromagnetic oscillations of extraterrestrial planetary objects, revealing a cosmos replete with a diversity of imperceptible inhuman sonorities. It is along this trajectory that we borrow from Murphy and Smith’s (2001) Deleuzian inflected provocation “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” for speculative ends. That is, by rejoining thought to such alien compositions 135

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as that of Comet 67P, we might become capable of relaunching sound along strange non-philosophical vectors in support of both new problems and horizons for human thought.

Sound does not care what you think: The cosmos-without-us For its modelization in grade school textbooks, enhanced telescopic imaging via Hubble, and through a myriad of popular science fiction television, film, and video game settings, the cosmos has long passed into general recognizability. Such familiarity might be said to occur by dint of what Thacker (2011) refers to as anthropic subversion, or rather, the territorialization of reality from a distinctly human-centric point of view. As an index of modernism’s aspiration that the Earth be refashioned for-us, anthropic subversion now extends beyond the “blue ruin” that is modernism’s horrific outcome. From the generalized reimaging of space as the new frontier for mining, to the anticipated colonization of Mars, the alien abyss of space becomes submitted to the will of human life. Such correlation is, of course, not new, having been anticipated in Medieval-Christian cosmology and its highly regulated universal ordering of things divine, terrestrial, and subterranean. Yet for the various ways in which the cosmos has been habituated to human sensibilities and rendered as a backdrop to our aesthetic preferences and desires, the electromagnetic recordings of Rosetta and Voyager confront us with something unsettling for their anonymity and impersonal character. This encounter marks the inversion of anthropic reactivity, or rather, the reversal of the human-centric presumption that both Earth and cosmos conform to a human point of view. The inhuman “sonority” of such objects as Comet 67P confronts us with a cosmos delinked from human will, desire, and aspiration. Instead, the unearthly electromagnetic recordings of Rosetta and Voyager portend a limit of human thought through their revelation of a cosmos that reflects not in the image of man, but an inhuman indifference that

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bespeaks a cosmos-without-us (Thacker 2011). That is, the recordings of Saturn’s rings, of Neptune’s electromagnetic oscillations, or Uranus’s moon Miranda delink from human reference in their revelation of an ancient and alien sonority existing before man and enduring beyond the horizon of its extinction. It is here that Murphy and Smith’s (2001) provocation that “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” assumes horrific proportion in that the “singing” of such inhuman objects suggests both “thought-without-man” and further, a cosmic thought unfathomable to humans for its existence outside the perceptual interpretive range of the organism. Herein, the electromagnetic “sonority” of the inhuman recedes from the projection of a human face upon the cosmos, palpating something distinctly outside to the assuredness of transcendent metaphysics and the cosmological ordering of the universe from the vantage of human life. The song of such objects as Comet 67P reveals an occult cosmic hermeticism that abates not only from the human territorialization of the cosmos, but further, from the refrain of inevitable human ascention that is counterpart to the extension of industrial and colonial interests beyond the Earth.

Reaching for the stars: The anthropic subversion of will.i.am As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) develop in A Thousand Plateaus, sound is intimate to the formation of territories. While not the sole means through which territories are created, sound is nevertheless integral to the process of territorializing space, or rather, of seizing upon and organizing the space of the Earth. The expressivity of birdsong, for example, functions to organize fuzzy territorial borders against wouldbe-intruders. The baying of wolves likewise produces territorial boundaries with other wolf packs, marking a space of the Earth against the territories of other predators. And so it goes with the territorializing function of televisions and radios, which carve from the milieu a circle, a household, a territory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 311). In this way,

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sonority frames chaos, or better, produces from the milieu of the Earth a refrain (ritournello) that answers to the forces of chaos. Here, we might think of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) case of a child’s singing while walking home in the dark. Marshaling the forces of anti-chaos against the night, the child’s song summons a sonorous wall that territorializes space through the repetition of a melody, a speed, a mixture of rhythmic consonants and vowels that mark out a shelter (311). It is in this mode of sonorous territorialization that humans have sought to seize upon the void of space, or rather, to intersect the decoded milieu of space with an anthropic “zone of residence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 315). This desire to “reside” over the Earth, mobilizing the forces of antichaos in the process, now extends to the cosmos. Launched into space in 1977, Voyager’s Golden Records offer one example of the way in which humans have sought to carve out sonic zones of residency, stretching human territorializations into the depth of interstellar space. Intended for intelligent alien life or future human explorers, Voyager’s Golden Records contain a wide array of sounds including samples from nature (thunder claps and crashing waves), the animal calls of birds, elephants, and domesticated dogs, samples of 55 human languages, and the compositions of such musicians as Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, and Valya Balkanska (“The Golden Record”). While varied in content, Voyager’s Golden Records nonetheless function as an expansion of an “anthropo-acoustic” refrain into the abyss of deep space. The production of such a cosmic refrain is intimate to both the exploratory and speculative expansion of the human species beyond the Earth, which continues to unfold today. In August of 2012, for example, NASA’s Curiosity rover debuted from the surface of Mars the EDM inflected will.i.am song Reach for the Stars. From the repetition of its lyrical refrain “[w]hy they say the sky is the limit?” to the familiarly quantized beat structure, Reach for the Stars supports both a real and imaginary flight from the earth through its anthropomorphic territorialization of the cosmos. While robotic vocalizations and “space echoes” launch will.i.am’s anthemic refrain into the conceptual sphere of “space,” the recognizable builds and drops and hopeful and decidedly

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resolved song structure intimate to contemporary pop and electronic dance music (EDM ) tether us back to Earthly familiarity. Coding the 56 million kilometer3 distance between the Earth and Mars via the metric regularity and driving refrain of EDM , Reach for the Stars works as yet another form of colonial Humanism suffused with the potentials of technological innovation. That the song was broadcast from the surface of Mars is undoubtedly significant. Beyond technological demonstration, the rover transmission posits the cosmos as a reflection of our own tastes, desires, and preferences. Supplanting the unfathomability of the cosmos with the echo of human life, the rover transmission redoubles the Kantian conjecture that man usurps God through substitution, where the voice of the heavens becomes analogous to our own. That is, the rover transmission found a cosmic refrain in which the “beyond” is no longer an impersonal void without humans, but rather, one recognizable for its acoustic reflection of human voice and expressive style. Warding off the forces of chaos, the infantile and quasi-motivational message of Reach for the Stars henceforth produces a “happy refrain” that extends the ambit of bourgeoisie human desire into the impersonal bleakness of space, which thus territorialized, supports a mode of colonial expansionism that has historically functioned by submitting the sonorous expression of others to the standardized metrics of the West.4 Herein, Murphy and Smith’s (2001) provocation that “what I hear is thinking too” is subverted through the projection of an anthropocentric refrain upon an inhuman cosmos, circumventing an encounter that might otherwise produce new conditions for thinking by shoring up the correlationist presumption that the cosmos exists to the extent that we think it, or rather, that the cosmos exists as it exists for us (Meillassoux 2008; Thacker 2011).

The misanthropic subtraction of Miranda While the acoustic territorialization of space might be thought as a way of managing the uncertainty of an incognizable cosmos, such a process

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is nevertheless imbricated with an anthropocentric philosophical legacy intimate to contemporary thought. Quentin Meillassoux (2008) articulates this legacy in After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, in which he outlines the problem of correlationism, or rather, the idea that access to the world is only ever access to the correlation between thought and its object. As Meillassoux writes, the thesis of correlationism asserts “the essential inseparability of the act of thinking from its content . . . [a]ll we ever engage with is what is given-to-thought, never an entity subsisting by itself ” (Meillassoux 2008: 36). The problem of correlationism hence pertains to a presupposed philosophy of access that assumes things cannot exist without their a priori givenness to thought, or rather, the presumption that reality exists only to the extent that we—humans—think it. This correlationist legacy thus contributes to the overarching anthropocentric conceit that reality is as it is for us (Thacker 2011). Yet, as the example of Comet 67P reveals, amidst the anthropic subversion of reality to human thought, something far more horrific can emerge by dint of what Thacker (2011) dubs misanthropic subtraction, or rather, the revelation of a universe-without-us. Another example, existing beyond the happy refrain of Reach for the Stars, is the desolate and impersonal electromagnetic “song” of Uranus’s moon Miranda. Recorded during the Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986, the eldritch electromagnetic “singing” of Miranda diverges from resemblance to terrestrial referent or refrain. Rather, the Voyager 2 recording captures an inhuman and unearthly drone that might defy reconciliation within human categories and taxonomies of registration. In this vein, Miranda’s “song” proposes a detachment from the ambit of human desire or the anthropomorphic reflection of human interests, becoming instead a harbinger of cosmic ambivalence toward human life. That is, Miranda’s bleak electromagnetic lamentation signals a metaphysical contortion in which human life is confronted by the thought of a cosmos without humans, and further, of occult cosmic entities that recede from our ability to think them. The desolate intonation of such impersonal and inhuman cosmic objects as Miranda

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break the conceit of correlationism by confronting human life with an occulted cosmos delinked from its dependency on human existence and withdrawn from the presumption of its givenness to human thought and meaning. To rejoin here with Murphy and Smith’s provocation that “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” is therefore to palpate the horror of misanthropic subtraction. Receding from both human sense and the submission of reality to human meaning, such inhuman cosmic objects as Miranda actualize the thought of human extinction in that they recede from the presumption that their existence and expression depends on human registration and categorization. Miranda’s “song” places us in the presence of something primordially anterior to human cognition and in this way, situates us at the limit of thought (Thacker 2015a). Herein, the thinking that one might hear in Miranda’s singing is far more negative than the familiar science fiction scenario in which alien life attempts to communicate with us. For opposed to the distinctly anthropocentric idea that things are given for us, Miranda’s song suggests the impersonal in-itself of the inhuman neither for or with human life (Thacker 2011: 17). At 2.6 billion kilometers from the earth, we might speculate that the inhuman song of Miranda perseveres without regard for the imagined order and purpose of the universe given by humans, and thus our existence as a species, and our potential extinction, is inconsequential to these cosmic sonorous expressions.

De/facializing the cosmos: Towards a cosmic pessimism The happy refrain of Reach for the Stars is just one example of the way in which humanistic territorial refrains are created through sonorous expression itself. The anthropic subversion enacted by the projection of will.i.am’s Earthly anthem into deep space produces a familiarization, a territory, wherein an otherwise boundless universe is subsumed under all-too human regimes of representation. As Deleuze and Guattari

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(1987) assert, however, territorialization is not fixed in time and space. Their concept of territory challenges the notion of static identifications and delineations because territorialization is itself a state of constant processing; there can be no territory without territorialization and subsequent deterritorialization. Territories are continually passing into something else, all the while maintaining internal organizations and thresholds. By recognizing that territories are always open to de/re/ territorializations, and thus that systems are never fully totalizing, we can see that there are always holey spaces that might offer new horizons for thinking. It is through the revelation of such holey spaces, and the dread that this holiness actualizes, that sound might work towards a cosmic pessimism that creates a break from thinking the world as it is meant to mean for us.

The sonic effect of an inhuman face Sound is a difficult concept to define. Understood in theoretical terms, sound can be construed as a moment of passage from unformed expression (noise) to formed expression (voice/sound) that is made possible by events (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). As Deleuze (1990: 194) writes: “[w]e constantly relive in our dreams the passage from noise to voice.” It is therefore not enough to understand sound in terms of its definitions and delineations, but rather sound must be recognized in terms of the sonic effects, the territories, to which it gives rise. In Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari (1986) offer an enigmatic approach to this very provocation, positing that sound is not a “form of expression,” but rather it is an “unformed material of expression, that will act on other terms” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 6). Sound is always fleeing, disappearing into difference and is thus capable of disorganizing its own form and that of content, so as to free up its own intense material of expression. Sound is, therefore, positioned as a force open to the multiplicity of flows that enable assemblages between bodies outside of what is readily representable; “in sound, intensity

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alone matters” and as such sound is always “non-signifying” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 6). The effect of this non-signifying material of expression is therefore one of re/de/territorialization; sound is not a process of reproduction or mimesis, nor is it representational, but rather a process of becoming. When the child summons their protective sonic wall while walking home in the dark, they are also mobilizing a force for becoming: becoming-sheltered, becoming-safe, becomingresidentiary. Likewise, in the example of will.i.am’s Reach for the Stars, sound is positioned as a force for becoming, that is, becoming-human, wherein a human face is projected against the void of deep space. Similar to man walking on the moon, the production of this sonic territory can be likened to the creation of a face that walks on the otherwise “inhuman face” of the cosmos. The problem that such sonic territorialization poses is thus not one of signification, but rather one of escape. How might sound be repositioned towards other becomings? Becoming-alien? Becoming-imperceptible? Becoming-inhuman? Becoming-pessimistic? What is needed is an exit from the overwhelming desire to identify the cosmos with a human face. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) unfold the concept of faciality upon the plateau of Year Zero. The idea of faciality is conceived in response to a particular political polemic, that is, the assertion that we require new commitments that work to dismantle a face that is always-already defined by a reassuring human essence, human “goodness,” or human exceptionalism. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is the face that gives the signifier substance; the face “fuels interpretation” by taking the otherwise abstract holes and surfaces of a body and correlating them to specific signifying traits that are indexed to a human face (1987: 168). The “black holes” of the face—the eyes, the mouth, the ears—exist as the binary co-requisite of the flat “white surface,” or wall of the signifier. Although considered constituent elements of the human face, these holes and surfaces are not human per se, rather we have learned to discern these human facial details, the holes and surfaces, by idealizing the power of human facial images. In this way, and not unlike the production of sonic territories, the face

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does not come “ready-made” (ibid.). Instead, facialization is engendered by an “abstract machine of faciality (visageite),” which produces the face against processes of signification and subjectification. The face does not “make sense” all by itself, but rather this codification depends on a system of machinic operations that draw the entire body across a holey surface, over-coding decoded parts in the process. To summarize, the main point that Deleuze and Guattari make is that the face does not come a priori but rather it is imposed on us universally; we are overcoded with faces, constantly over-determining our identities. The face is thus another mechanism that works to territorialize an otherwise indeterminate universe of potential. As Deleuze and Guattari write, it is through the face that we learn to define “zones of frequency or probability” which allow us to “delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unnamable to the appropriate significations” (ibid.). If we extend this thinking to the example of will.i.am, the happy refrain of Reach for the Stars allows us to neutralize fear of an unknowable cosmos by constructing a face against which human significations can launch forth. Likewise with Comet 67P, the mediation and registration of its sonority (the speeding up of the signal for human perception) allows us to frame its signification through an indexically human face. As Deleuze and Guattari assert, however, the face is also a sort of “horror story” (ibid.). Considered as a form of territorialization, the process of facialization is open to alternative becomings; the black holes and white surfaces of the face are susceptible to both self-annihilation and/or re-engagements with different planes of becoming. The inhuman in human beings, is, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 171), what the face is from the start; the face is “by nature a close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness and boredom” (ibid.). These thinkers therefore urge us to take a closer look at the face, so as to notice its constituent parts and their unusual becomings, in turn breaking through the dominating white face, or wall of the signifier, while avoiding being swallowed by the black hole. To this end, Deleuze and Guattari assert one must renounce the face by

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becoming-imperceptible, or what we might think of in the context of this investigation, becoming-inhuman: “[y]es, the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective” (ibid.). We must therefore recognize that there is something “absolutely inhuman about the face” (1987: 170) and that it is the face itself that might reveal the indifference of the cosmos, and thus a certain pessimism when it comes to thinking humans in relation to the world.

Cosmic pessimism and dreadful possibilities Considered as a non-signifying force for becoming, sound offers a trajectory for the revelation of such inhuman realizations in the way that it is able to tear sense from over-coded human representations. The bleak “singing” of Miranda, for instance, contorts the face of the cosmos through an intense material of expression that exceeds human perception. The sonic emissions from this body create a sort of dissonance, an irrevocable deterritorialization, that functions by “taking flight” and bringing into play new connections and perceptions (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 28). The inhuman improvisations produced by Miranda, as well as Comet 67P, recede from anthropic subversion, in turn affirming a cosmic pessimism that evokes a dismantling of the projected human face on the cosmos. The realization that such sounds exceed and override human capacities, creates a sense of unease; the fragmenting perceptual excesses produced by these cosmic bodies quash commonsense correlations between thought and its object, thus producing an overwhelming sense of dread. The dreadful impression created by these planetary bodies is significant in the way that it differs from more common feelings of danger ascribed to human explorations of deep space. It is not that we fear these sonic emissions in terms of their content, but rather, what we fear is our inability to recognize ourselves within them. This dreadful sensibility is not a sensation of immediacy, but rather a feeling that

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something is impending. Positioned as an occult manifestation of some near future event hovering over the now, dread allows us to project forward into the future by dismantling the over-coded faces, the human exceptionalism and anthropic subversions that have come to define our conceptions of the world. It is therefore this sense of dread that might catalyze the misanthropic subversion of which Thacker (2011) speaks, in turn activating the necessary conceptual frameworks for revisioning the future in terms of lines of flight, or new openings. Like dread, it is these abstract and formless openings—the uncoded holes and their co-requisite surfaces—that mark the horizon of new possibilities for thinking.

Sound at the end of the world: Interstellar refrains and inhuman speculations Our desire to continuously facialize the cosmos stems from a deepseated fear of our own species’ extinction. Through anthropic territorializations, including those created through sound, we are able to mark out a shelter within an otherwise unfathomable space-time continuum, thus holding the dreadful and inhuman potential of the cosmos at bay. Christopher Nolan’s (2014) Interstellar exemplifies this all-too-human aspiration, counterposing the threat of human extinction with the promise of intergalactic space exploration. As the film foretells, the future of the human species is linked to an escape from an unrecognizable Earth at the brink of the post-anthropocene. As the film’s unshrinking hero, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), articulates, “[m]ankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.” In an effort to save the species, the remnants of NASA organize a last-ditch effort to locate a habitable world for colonization. With Cooper at the mission helm, a team of astronauts venture beyond the solar system where they are tasked with surveying three potentially habitable worlds. In this mission, Interstellar imagines the death of the Earth as a predestined eventuality in humankind’s cosmic ascension. On the

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teleology of this ascension, Cooper opines, “[w]e’re still pioneers, [we’ve] barely begun. Our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, [because] our destiny lies above us.” Such destiny is marked by anthropic subversion through which the weird cosmic events figured in Interstellar are ultimately attributed to human design, or rather, made to reflect in the presumption that the cosmos is not only for us, but further, by us in design. Reterritorialized upon a human face, the inhuman horror and queer cosmic phenomena of Interstellar’s wormholes, black holes, and paranormal events are captured in the image of human ardor, ingenuity, and perseverance. Here, Interstellar rehabilitates the general idea of manifest destiny at a cosmic scale of significance, expanding the presumption of anthropocentrism to universal proportion.

Post-anthropocene sonority While reiterating the colonial-pioneer dream of expansion, Interstellar concomitantly jettisons an Earth that no longer repeats in the image of human dominion or supremacy. Here, Interstellar figures alongside a growing body of dystopian films that palpate the pessimistic sonority of a planet-without-us. The haunting silence of London in Danny Boyle’s (2002) 28 Days Later, the reterritorialization of the New York soundscape by animal life in Francis Lawrence’s (2007) I Am Legend, and revelation of elemental sonority of AMC ’s The Walking Dead each pertain to thinking the end of the human species counterpart to the revelation of inhuman sonority. And so it goes with the speculative television series Life After People, which posits a post-anthropocene soundscape of audibly decaying architectural forms, dampened human refrains, and the intensified auditory expression of animal life and primordial elemental sonorities. This is to suggest that our encounter with cosmic pessimism does not simply pertain to the visual absence of the human, but the adumbration of an inhuman sonority that detaches from its representation or reflection of human vitality. It is in this vein that thinking born from both the inhuman and its expressions might figure

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as a fulcrum for relaunching metaphysics without the presumption of human exceptionalism at its center. Not every “bump” in the night has as its root either a human manifestor or recognizable meaning “for us.” As in the horror fiction of H. P Lovecraft (2008), the inhuman marks the doom of human signification—the destruction of the face—in the way that it indicates something delinked from human meaning as its organizing referent. Once the face is destroyed, the “black holes” and “white surfaces” are relieved of their signifying duties, positioned instead as harbingers of alternative connections and novel becomings. Cosmic objects such as 67P provide speculations on such becomings, that is, the imperceptible temporalities, scales, and materialisms beyond the scope of human production and sense. Not even the dystopian scene of a decelerated planet given back to the “green earth” (resonant with an all-too-human fantasy about starting over) yet fathoms the impersonal pessimism of the cosmos, let alone the impersonal inhumanity of the Earth as it recedes from the ostensible supremacy of human control and management.

Towards an inhuman speculation By speculating on the inhuman and occult sonority of the cosmos, one might not only fabulate modes of thought capable of counteractualizing the correlationist conceit of reality’s a priori givenness to thought, but further the tendencies of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphization as they are reified and extended in an act of accelerated cosmic territorialization. Speculation, in this way, offers a form of escape from the inveterate anthropocentrism that has come to characterize thinking, that is if we are to take seriously the existence of fundamentally alien, inhuman worlds. The strategy of speculation has become increasingly popular in philosophy circles. Speculative realism, a term developed in conjunction with a 2007 academic conference at Goldsmiths College in London, is now used to describe a wide range of contemporary thought. As writers and thinkers associated with speculative realism are eager

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to point out, this philosophical current does not encompass one single philosophical framework. What these positions do have in common, however, is their attempt to think beyond the limits of what we, as human beings, were long considered able to think, speculating instead about the nature of the non-human and what such thinking might provide for the many issues we face in our contemporary moment. Understood as the ability to articulate and enable contingencies of the given, always with incomplete certainty, while remaining faithful to an incalculable future, philosophical speculation allows the development of an “experimental responsiveness to epistemic, ontological and systemic variation” (Reed 2014: 578). Such speculation employs many different conceptual strategies that work to “shatter the Kantian Mirror” and/or turn that mirror around, what we have explored here as the correlationist legacy, so that it might face away from reified visions of the subject, towards thinking the world in terms of its relationship to itself (Braidotti and Vermeulen 2014). Although rife with potential, the strategy of speculation is vulnerable to the temporarily of “what is,” a nowness that works to cloud the very futurity of what might be, thus limiting thinking to a set of givens that are always-already known. Philosophical speculation therefore necessitates a sense of becoming possible of the impossible and thus a mobilization of powers of the false that might work to create a future that goes beyond pure diagnostics and/or historical exemplification. Taken as a speculative gambit, it might be ventured that the revelation of an occulted and inhuman sonorous universe necessitates the radical reassessment of why thought would continue to be grounded in the human as thought’s horizon.5 To rejoin here with Murphy and Smith’s (2001) provocation that “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” engages the horrifying prospect of inhuman thought that is neither for us or resemblant with human modes of cognition. Despite our thinking of them in ways that assume their passivity for us, the sonority of cosmic objects impart their thinking in a primordial mode that antedates human epistemology. The sonority of such planetary bodies as Miranda and Comet 67P palpate an occulted materialism both without-humans

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and indifferent to human reception. To conjecture on inhuman sonority is to encounter a cosmos of a wholly alien order, singing as it does with primeval organs that resemble neither the privileged lunglarynx-mouth assemblage or hand-instrument assemblage of human expressivity. Analysis of this expression must therefore be extended to a horrific speculation on the thought of the inhuman where such thinking begets a form of extreme negativity toward a universe ordered from the perspective of the human species. To extend Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we might in this vein wage the potentially horrific speculation that the expressions of deep space objects themselves constitute inhuman territories of unfathomable motive. Akin to Thacker’s (2012) speculation on the occulted will of oil figured in the petrol-horror fiction of Fritz Leiber’s “Black Gondolier,” the anthropocentric conceit of discovery might be misanthropically subtracted. Where the “Black Gondolier” posits the misanthropically subversive proposition that oil discovered humans, a similar premise might be extended to such objects as the nomadic Comet 67P. Composed of elements from the pre-solar nebula, Comet 67P is one of the most primitive bodies of the cosmos and yet was not discovered until 1969, having long since discovered us in its periodic orbit through the solar system and perhaps further, the interception of radio waves broadcast from the planet’s surface. The song of 67P, therefore, constitutes a version of Meillassoux’s (2008) arche-fossil, or rather, an ancient material and materialism predating the emergence of (human) life. This materialism introduces a curious problematic to the reactive tendencies of contemporary anthropic thought. Anterior to the emergence of (human) life, the arche-fossil exists prior to both the supposition of the world’s givenness to (human) thought and its attendant, all-too-human metrics of temporality, scale, and consciousness. Not only is the arche-fossil prior to the world’s presumed givenness to thought, but as Meillassoux advances, it is “indifferent” or rather, non-correlative to the ambit of human interpretation (2008: 22). The arche-fossil posits the limitation of human thought by constituting an unfathomable “outside” both prior to and unexhausted by human

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meaning. That “what I hear is thinking too” herein suggests not only the conjunction of sound and thought, but as it pertains to inhuman sonority, to a style of thinking without humans, and further, of thought launched along inhuman vectors of expression though which we might question not only the vaunted supremacy of human epistemology and creativity, but perhaps more profoundly, the metaphysical ordering of reality from the vantage of a single expressive species.

Articulating a method: Hyperstitional thinking and sound without organs Returning to Smith and Murphy’s provocation that “what I hear is thinking too,” we can see sound how sound might operate as a conceptual tool that unfolds along two trajectories. First, sound is positioned as an expressive mode aligned with moments bound up in the emergence of new becomings; by destroying the face we are pushed to recognize the limits of the all-too-human “black holes” and “white walls” that have come to bind signification to the world as something that is given, as opposed to how it might be. In turn, these productions call for a dilation of thought beyond what is readily recognizable and accessible to human systems of perception and registration. Secondly, and as the emissions of Comet 67P and Miranda highlight, sound provides a site to speculate on the “thinking” of planetary bodies themselves. Like Meillassoux’s arche-fossils, the cosmic sonority referenced in this investigation reveals a “cosmic horror,” that is, the revelation of immense and inhuman time scales, dark materials, and energies that foretell the existence of dimensions outside of our traditionally recognizable reality. Positioned in conjunction with thought itself, sound therefore offers a site for philosophical speculation, and ultimately the production of new hyperstitions. Coined by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU ) in the 1990s, hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words “hyper” and “superstition” to describe the action of favorable ideas in the arena of

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culture. Hyperstition describes both the effects and mechanisms of what the CCRU term “apocalyptic postmodern ‘phase out’ or ‘meltdown’ culture,” wherein the (hu)man itself is something that needs to be overcome (Carstens 2013). According to Nick Land (2012b) hyperstition can be understood as a positive feedback circuit defined as the experimental science of self-fulfilling prognostications. Whereas superstitions are understood as merely fictitious beliefs, hyperstitions, by their very existence as ideas, work to bring about their own versions of reality. Free-market capitalism, for example, is one hyperstitional feedback cycle that has been “downloaded” into the cultural mainframe, in turn exponentially accelerating social transformations. Likewise, and in relation to this investigation, the legacy of anthropic subversion is another hyperstition that has come to subtend the very way in which we perceive and thus construct reality. Falling outside the parameters of conventional philosophy, the concept of hyperstition operates as an approach for speculative thinking wherein ideas are understood not in terms of their a priori significations, but rather as diagrams that are “executed by functional complexes of currents, switches, and loops, caught in scaling reverberations, and fleeing through intercommunications, from the level of the integrated planetary system to that of atomic assemblages” (Land 2012b: 443). Hyperstition, in this way, can be likened to what Deleuze and Guattari have termed Bodies without Organs (BwOs), those connective exploration devices that function to “map” new cognitive territories. The BwO, like a hyperstition, indicates an indeterminate flux of deterritorialized energy, which necessitates an investigation of the very mechanisms of striation and stratification that make up our own constructions of reality. The CCRU, along with 0rphan Drift, use the concept of hyperstition to outline the way in which such mechanization operates, highlighting four functionalities that, taken together, describe the way in which “meltdown” culture comes about. These functionalities characterize hyperstition as: (1) an “element of effective culture that makes itself real”; (2) a “fictional quality functional as a time-traveling device”; (3) a “coincidence intensifier”; and (4) a “call to the Old Ones”

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(CCRU and 0D 1999: 3). These characteristics describe how hyperstitions enact their subversive influences in the cultural arena, becoming transmuted into perceived “truths” that subsequently impact the outcome of history. At the same time, however, these functionalities indicate the way in which hyperstition also signals the return of the irrational or the monstrous “other” into the cultural arena. In the case of this investigation, this “other” might be understood as the inhuman and indifferent sonority of the cosmos itself. It is this horrific sonority that might work as a hyperstition, a BwO, or what we would like to propose here as the SwO, Sound without Organs. That speculation on inhuman sonority might intervene with the philosophical presumptions of correlationism and anthropocentrism suggests the necessity of a broader reconceptualization of sound, such that it might be freed from its overdetermination by all-too-human refrains of expression and meaning. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the precursor to such reconceptualization might be figured in the form of an anti-model we dub Sound without Organs (SwO). By the SwO, we intend to not only delink sonority from its orthodox assemblages (the lung-larynx-mouth or hand-instrument indexed to the human face), but further, to dilate sonority beyond the organism itself, where sound might become capable of remaking thought via such weird instantiations of expression as the electromagnetic materialisms of cosmic bodies. Here, what might be dubbed the SwO portends a style of thinking that is not yet a refrain, nor the reflection of human potentials for sonorous expression. Rather, to think the SwO astride the inhuman suggests dilating the very notion of the organism so as to produce a broader ontological account of sonorous expression such as the electromagnetic registration of ionized cosmic particulate. Yet, this dilated ontological account of expression is not simply additive, but more radically, subtractive for its misanthropic subversion of the (human) organism and its expressive territorializations of both the planet and cosmos coextensive of anthropocentrism. What is needed is thus a new demand for philosophical developments, wherein thought is not defined by a world bound by anthropic

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subversions, but rather the impetus to develop new philosophical speculations. The hyperstitional functionality of the SwO provides one such opportunity for speculation. Conceptualized in terms of its hyperstitional power, the SwO exposes the horrific and inhuman quality of sound, bringing about a sort of apocalypse in thinking—a cosmic pessimism—in turn creating space for new speculations. Like Land’s hyperstition, the SwO operates as an “element of effective culture that makes itself real” (CCRU and 0D 1999: 3) in the way that sonority is dilated beyond the organism itself. The SwO produces an alternative sense of perceptual reality that is not bound by “human” potential, and is therefore open to new connections and cultural assemblages. In addition, the sonic effects to which the SwO gives rise, that is the overwhelming sense of dread produced through misanthropic subtractions, acts as a “fictional quality [that functions] as a time-traveling device” (CCRU and 0D 1999: 3). The dreadful prospect of an inhuman cosmos launches us into the future, not as all-knowing pioneers, or manifestors of some pre-determined “human” destiny, but rather as partial objects that are actualized by our immanent relations to the world and beyond. The SwO also works against correlationism, instead functioning as what we might think of as a “coincidence intensifier” (CCRU and 0D 1999: 3). As both the examples of Comet 67P and Miranda illustrate, these celestial bodies exist prior to the supposition of the world’s givenness to (human) thought, and it is thus only through “coincidence,” a cosmic indifference, that we have “discovered” their being. As Land writes: “[f]rom the side of the human subject, ‘beliefs’ hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time” (Land 2009). Lastly, like Land’s hyperstition, the SwO signals a “call to the Old Ones.” Similar to Meillassoux’s arche-fossils, the inhuman sonority of the cosmos reveals an ancient materialism predating the emergence of (human) life and thus human meaning. Made possible by advances in the technological capacities of our processors and the vision-enhancing capabilities of

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our microscopes, we have “unveiled” the existence of dimensions outside of our perceptual limits, which in turn presents a new challenge to anthropocentric and correlationist legacies in thought. Thought as a hyperstitional force, the concept of sound without organs (SwO), or the delinking of sonority from its orthodox philosophical assemblages, provides the necessary deterritorialization that might recapitulate thought as a mode of concept-production. It is this concept-production, fuelled by the provocation that “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” that holds the potential to rejoin thought to inhuman trajectories, the “old ones,” in turn relaunching sound as a strange conceptual impetus for the creation of both new problems and alternative horizons for thought.

Notes 1 This electromagnetic oscillation is presumed to be the effect of cometary jet ionization and particle interactions with the comet’s magnetic field. 2 Other instances of uncanny soundscapes in the media range from the detection of “trumpet sounds” linked to background noise generated by the Earth to longstanding evidence of uncanny atmospheric noises hypothesized to large-scale acoustic-gravity waves produced by solar flares distrupting the magnetosphere, ionosphere, and atmosphere. 3 This distance reflects the closest orbital distance between the Earth and Mars, with the furthest being recorded on March 3, 2012 at 100.7 million kilometers. 4 As Mackay (1997) develops, the colonization of Africa by the West included the destruction of tribal drums, the machinic instrument connecting the body of the individual to the collective and further, to the collective virtual history of the tribal assemblage. Western colonials intervened first to eradicate the machinic potential of the drum, marking one of the primary strategies underpinning the African slave trade. Upon the tatters of destroyed drums, colonials would subsequently claim that Africa was devoid of both historical memory or the means for its recording.

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5 Emerging inquiry in the field of epigenetics suggests that human genes are being “triggered” by planetary transformations and environmental factors such as global warming.

Works cited 28 Days Later (2002), [Film] Dir. Danny Boyle. USA : 20th Century Fox. Braidotti, R. and T. Vermeulen (2014), “Borrowed Energy.” Frieze, Issue 165, September. Available online: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/ borrowed-energy/ (accessed May 20, 2015). Carstens, D. (2013), “HYPERSTITION ȩ 2010.” Merliquify. September 5, 2013. Available online: http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/ hyperstition/#.VX hQeVxVhBc (accessed May 20, 2015). Carstens, J. P. (Delphi). (2013), “Uncovering the Apocalypse: Narratives of Collapse and Transformation in the 21st Century Fin de Siècle.” PhD diss., Stellenbosch University, 2013. CCRU and 0rphan Drift (1999), Meshed: Digital Unlife Catacomic. London: Beaconsfield. Coplan, C. (2014), “Scientists release incredible audio of ‘singing’ Comet 67P.” Available online: http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/11/scientists-releaseincredible-audio-of-singing-comet-67p-listen/ (accessed May 1, 2015). Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. C. Stivale and M. Lester. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze G. and F. Guattari (1986), Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. I Am Legend (2007), [Film] Dir. Francis Lawrence. USA : Warner Bros. “The Golden Record.” Voyager: The Interstellar Mission. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ). Available online: http:// voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html. (accessed May 6, 2015). Interstellar (2014), [Film] Dir. Christopher Nolan. USA : Paramount Pictures. Land, N. (2009), “Hyperstition: An Introduction.” Merliquify.com. Available online: http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/#. UTdvwMXEP iw (accessed February 5, 2010).

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Land, N. (2012), “Machinic Desire,” in R. Mackay and R. Brassier (eds), Fanged Noumena, 319–44. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Land, N. (2012b), “Meltdown,” in R. Mackay and R. Brassier (eds), Fanged Noumena, 441–60. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Life After People (2009), [Television Series] Exec. Producer Douglas Cohen. USA : Flight 33 Productions. Lovecraft, H. P. (2008), Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, S. Jones (ed.). London: Gollancz. Mackay, R. (1997), “Capitalism and schizophrenia: Wildstyle in full effect,” in K. Ansell Pearson (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, 247–69. New York: Routledge. MacKay, R. (2012), “A Brief History of Geotrauma,” in E. Keller, N. Masciandaro, and E. Thacker (eds), Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, 1–38. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2008), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. R. Brassier. London: Continuum. Murphy, T. S. and D. W. Smith (2001), “What I Hear is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop”, ECHO: A Music-Centred Journal, 3(1). Available online: http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume3-Issue1/smithmurphy/ (accessed June 2, 2015). O’Neill, I. (2014), “Comet sings a mysterious song to Rosetta.” Available online: http://news.discovery.com/space/comet-sings-mysterious-song-torosetta-141111.htm. (accessed May 5, 2015). Reed, P. (2014), “Reorientate, Eccentricate, Speculate, Fictionalize, Geometricize, Commonize, Abstractify: Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism,” in R. Mackay and A. Avanessian (eds), # ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, 521–36. Berlin and London: Urbanomic and Merve Verlag. Thacker, E. (2011), In The Dust Of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. UK : Zero Books. Thacker, E. (2012), “Black Infinity; Or, Oil Discovers Humans,” in E. Keller, N. Masciandaro, and E. Thacker (eds), Leper Creativity : Cyclonopedia Symposium, 173–80. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Press. Thacker, E. (2015a), Starry Speculative Corpse. Washington, D. C.: Zero Books. Thacker, E. (2015b), Tentacles longer than night. Washington, D.C.: Zero Books. The Walking Dead (2012), [Television Series] Creator: Frank Darabont. USA : American Movie Classics. will.i.am, Reach for the Stars (Mars Edition), ©2012 by Interscope, Digital Download.

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Buzzing off . . . Toward Sonic Thinking Christoph Lischka

Proem “At the outset . . . we are furnished only with material for the production of material, that is, of sound of high or low pitch; in other words, the measurable tone” (Hanslick 1891: 144). “Sounds are among the things we hear. . . . Sounds, therefore, are intentional objects of audition” (Nudds and O’Callaghan 2009: 4). “Sound, as singularity, . . . as bodily manifestation . . . reveals, even that which . . . cannot be said . . .” (Mersch 2002: 116f). Q: What is real about a quantum system? A: That “sensitivity to the touch,” that “zing!” that keeps us from ever having more information about it than can be encoded in a quantum state (Fuchs 2011: 521).

Ontologies It is still quite amazing how easily you could get people confused as soon as you enter a conversation about everyday life with, say, a physicist and a lay person.

Free will Let us start with a well-known argument, which usually runs as follows. 159

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Everyday experience tells us that we are involved into “decisions” every moment, and that these decisions are free—at least to some crucial extent, e.g. our whole society is based on some sort of blaming apparatus, where derangements can be controlled and eventually “repaired” by identifying responsibilities. Yet, asking our physicist, we would get a very different narrative; because—she reminds us—nature is thoroughly deterministic, and because we—as human beings—are essentially part of nature as well, there is no free will: every detail of our behavior is physically determined (actually, we are just complex machines), and (free) decisions, responsibilities, etc., are nothing but a “subjective” epitheton ornans of hard-wired physical processes—in fact, they are pure illusions. To reformulate this narrative in more technical terms: every natural “system”—including human agencies—can be modeled along the lines of (nonlinear) Dynamical Systems Theory; its behavior might be unpredictable, but it is still deterministic.

Thinking positive? Both these narratives can be raised immediately to a highly confusing level: by revealing some of the most obvious underlying assumptions of the arguments we would most often terminate any further discussion— most often, because our dialog partners would not understand our questions. For example, it usually turns out to be unimaginable by many people that concepts like system, thing, process, space, agency, cause and effect—concepts which populate our minds when we are “thinking” or talking about our world—that those concepts are part of a very specific, contingent archeology of ways of world making (Goodman 1978), i.e. that they are contingent sedimentations of “ideas” back at least two-and-a-half-thousand years, coined by people like Parmenides, Plato, Aristoteles and “enhanced” later by modern philosophers like Descartes and Locke. Neglecting and disregarding this contingent genealogy will inevitably end up in a quite positivist view of our so-called reality: the world as a

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stage of distal objects, with a non-participative epistemology and the well-known subject-object separation, and a more or less manifest mind/body dichotomy—taken as a non-circumventable, predefined space of possibilities, within which our “world” can be explored, exploited, and technologically deconstructed. As long as this specific view is treated as an out of many one (tolerating alternate “ways of world making”), we should not bother. Yet as soon as it turns into a vivid, sometimes even aggressive reductionism and universalism, combined with the claim of an overall ubiquity—we should! In the sciences, unfortunately, occurrences like the widely known Sokal Affair (Sokal and Bricmont 1998), or the arising hegemony of “computational ontologies” and artificial intelligence based algorithmic thinking, suggest an emerging imbalance of viewpoints which might eventually let us get stuck in a highly blind spotted reality—thereby concealing crucial alternatives of very different ontological setups. Yet exactly those, in turn, could reveal promising “images of thought” (Deleuze and Guattari 2007) in order to identify and overcome unmistakable rumbling conceptual inadequacies and incoherences of this apparently “ultimate” layout of (human) experience.

Inadequacies and incoherences But why should this “metaphysical” colloquy matter anyway? Many people would even characterize this kind of “philosophical” dispute as—at best—superfluous. The fact is that there are quite deep problems with the ontological “rooting” of our current scientific discourses—problems that are even realized within sciences themselves, and which have led to strange aporiae. As we will soon notice this happens especially in one of the leading sciences itself: one of the most pressing topics in the foundations of physics today is the consolidation of a deep incoherence between General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory—a research field

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well-known as Quantum Gravity. Surprisingly, this incoherence can be traced back to a break-down of concepts like object, space, locality, participativity, to name just a few. Now, Alfred N. Whitehead, in his monumental Process and Reality (Whitehead 1978), has already suggested that we have to reformulate the ancient Syzygy of permanence and flow in order to get an appropriate ontological framework matching the needs of contemporary thinking. Unfortunately, this evokes an even harder problem—the adaption and redesign of language. Whitehead identified language as one of the most important “tools” available for metaphysical analyzes, and was quite aware of the problem of inadequate means of expression: An old established metaphysical system gains a false air of adequate precision . . . Thus propositions expressed in its language are more easily correlated to our flitting intuitions . . . When we trust these verbal statements and argue as though they adequately analysed meaning, we are led into difficulties. Whitehead 1978:14

Let us illustrate these problems in a bit more detail.

Everyday life It has often been noticed that the specific subject-predicate-object structure of our Standard Average European languages (Tyler 1984) imposes a substance/attributive thinking, a thinking in terms of things (i.e. objects) and their properties (ibid). Let us consider the concept of materiality, for instance. In everyday life we would most probably interpret material as stuff that has to be sculpted; a passive receptacle—in-formed by an active agency and molded by changing appropriate attributes. This concept—introduced by Aristoteles through the trilogy of hýle/morphé/stéresis—set the stage for the description of change as (formal) modification of an enduring being (i.e. substance).

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The implications of this conceptual arrangement are rather weighty. In the first place it gives us a dominance of permanence over fluency. Combined with a principal heteroactivity and a strong deterministic evolution, eventually our world will end up as a closed block universe, without time, suffering from a lack of any innovation and creativity (Barbour 2000, Rovelli 2009, Ellis and Rothman 2010)—a situation which is in a stark contrast to our everyday evidence, as the example at the beginning of this text has shown.

Cultural studies Yet this thinking has also shaped the so-called cultural studies. To begin with, there is (beyond aggressive reductionist narratives) an almost universal tacit agreement that the “Social” and the “Natural” are games of a principally different kind, obeying its own rules, respectively, and interacting according to complex protocols managing the difficulties of dualistic, supervenient, reductionist, etc., layouts of the very gap between mind and body. As an inevitable consequence these “games” induce quite often “mysterious” endeavors to bridge these different worlds, sometimes up to a complete denial of each other. There are at least two braids of presumptions which control the strategies of cultural studies. First, almost anywhere there is an implicit agreement that any reference to nature is done from a Newtonian Physics perspective; rather naively the whole classical doctrine is taken as granted, and there seems to be no clue that this Weltbild (world view) within physics itself has changed for many, many years already. Second, as it stands, this obsolete metaphysics affects cultural studies with respect to their dominant semiotic paradigm. The ubiquitous imperialism of semiosis has infected almost every aspect of contemporary theories on (human) cultural and social processes. The early success of linguistics and structuralism at the beginning of the last century enticed other disciplines to import the entire existing conceptual machinery of these frameworks: sign, signifier, signified;

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meaning, sense; communication and mediality; materiality of sign carriers; text and intertextuality. A “semiotics” of music, architecture, and fashion, hyphenated semiotics of various sorts emerged; even emotions are now brought under the administration of the linguistic discourse. In blunt consequence, the semiotic narrative, along with the Newtonian stance, deepens the entanglement with the Cartesian and Lockean bifurcation of nature, as Whitehead conceptualized the separation of our integral experience in primary (nature) and secondary (mind) aspects: the subject in a clear-cut, non-participative opposition to the (objective) world which can be explored, described, and represented. Most recently we can observe a shift toward the “materiality” of media and communication, obviously in order to overcome these semiotic legacies. One prominent topic—among others—has become what Aristoteles distinguished from “raw sound” (psóphos): the voice (phoné).“Voice” is a capacity of living beings, and implies the articulation of (raw) sound. Mersch (passim), for example, is concerned with the bodily-ness of the resonating voice, its singularity—as opposed to its mediality which is fundamental for the articulation of meaning, and as such is infected by alterity (break, cut, difference—“tranche” with Saussure) (Mersch 2006: 214). Yet, by adopting Saussure’s concept of an “amorphous matter” of sound that has to be articulated, Mersch still subscribes to an Aristotelian inspired ontology of substance/form— setting for himself the constraints for discussing change (in particular the performativity and event character of the embodied voice) in terms of modal (heteroactive) variations of substances (Mersch 2006: 215).

Physics After all, especially due to its dramatic development in the last hundred years, we should expect that physics would present us a quite different narrative, at least with respect to most of the Newtonian legacies.

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If at all, the “enlightened physicist” of today should talk about “particles” in his everyday practise only in a metaphorical way— knowing that those very particles are not real anymore in any traditional sense: particles are only identifiable (and separable) under very specific conditions of observation; they exhibit only partial (i.e. complementary, but “incomplete”) views on reality; and they do not have in general, for example, a defined location—the list could be continued. And yet there is still plenty of non-metaphorical talk: “enduring systems” (the stuff ) can be identified—an “electron” for example—and their (observable) properties (the electron’s “spin”) can be measured. Or people tell us that they “observe” traces of particles in space-time; some are even attempting to re-design our logic in order to save propositional thinking and simultaneously fit it to “quantum reality” (Girard 2011: 370). But the most serious “deprivation” to tackle concerns the loss of (classical) “objectivity”: as it turns out, nature could not be treated from a distal point of view anymore; as the physicist John A. Wheeler already argued decades ago—our universe is participatory: “The universe is a self-excited circuit. As it expands, cools and develops, it gives rise to observer-participancy. Observerparticipancy in turn gives what we call ‘tangible reality’ to the universe” (Wheeler 1978: 22). In sum: even in advanced physics Newton is luring anywhere; people still have difficulties to accept those strange implications of Quantum Physics. Yet there are many interesting attempts to overcome the Newtonian stance, in particular in the fields of Quantum Information, Quantum Computation, Quantum Gravity—“conceptual experiments” which we will discuss later with respect to their more general potential.

Sonic research Now one area of research will be of particular interest in the context of our discussion: sonic research.

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Quite recently, the new field of “Sound Studies” came up, complementing classical musicology. As we might expect both these fields of research are distributed over diverse disciplines, as there are semiotics, media theory, history, hermeneutics, psychology, computer science, to name just a few. In order to understand why sound as a scientific objective suffers from ancestral ontologies, a brief glance at the archeology of sound, particularly in music and language, should help to put contemporary scientific discourses on sound into perspective. The Pythagorean line—as is well known—started with the astonishing fact that there is an intimate link between pitch and frequency, which in turn allowed the abstraction of enduring, identifiable relations between quite artificial sound occurrences (“tones”), and resulted in a mathematical treatment of harmonic patterns. The latter can be instantiated almost everywhere (a huge range of “models” exists); hence “real” sound depraved to being a minor matter. Nevertheless, this kind of research survived through the Middle Ages in the context of the “Artes Liberales” (as musica), and eventually led to modern acoustics. As such it generated the foundations for a thorough physical analysis of vibratory patterns in the air and in other “substances,” interpretable as sound (often called sound patterns), yet divested completely from their genuine phenomenal qualities: the contemporary “physics of sound” became—paradoxically—silent. But—we briefly touched this topic earlier in this paper—there was a second “line of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) to re-territorialize sound: the language metaphor, particularly in music. Without any doubt there are raw semiotic aspects to sound, as to any perception; at least some sort of indexicality is at work. Aristoteles (1956: 418a) already made a distinction between whiteness—the directly perceptible (aisthetón)—and the Son of Diares—the incidentally perceptible (katà symbebekós). Thus it is quite seductive to extrapolate these rudimentary hints of semiosis, and construct a comprehensive semiotic architecture in order to theorize sound. This might work for language (but see below). It obviously does not work for music—except for very special

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situations and contexts, like program music, or the European (Baroque) doctrine of affections (in German: Affektenlehre) which enslaves music under a semiotic regime. Hanslick (1891) already discussed this topic at length in his “The Beautiful in Music,” arguing for a purified, formal aesthetics of music that—at the opposite extreme—reduces it to an arabesque mosaic, a kaleidoscope of tones and harmonies (Hanslick 1891: 67): disembodied, pure syntax. An yet, why does it not work anyway? The irony is that with respect to sound, it works neither for music nor for language. Rather, the semiotization of both music and language evidences the legacies of the ancient Gigantomachia between Plato and the Poets, in particular Homer. It reflects the intellectualization and idealization of experience, the invention of “mind” and the establishment of the “idea” as the really real, and the denunciation of process, in particular sound, as deficient. Mimesis was turned into a pharmakon (Derrida 1981): like a virus it had to be put in quarantine and was banished from the “Republic” (Havelock 1963). The inevitable result of this maneuver was—again—the elimination of sound: in the Occidental mind there is dead silence. Both in the mind of the philosopher and in the mind of the musician. The voice, as the prominent medium of thinking in our Occidental phonocentrism, achieves its prominence precisely as a result of its ontological transparency, its mode of enduring absence, whereby it creates the illusion of perfect self presence (Selbstgegenwärtigkeit), as Derrida has analyzed in extenso (Derrida 1973). Sound “is” un-real, for “it is” nonpresent. And the same happens for thinking music as soon as it operates under a semiotic code, either with a direct linguistic perspective, or in a more indirect, “syntactical” mode (as with Hanslick): in any case, real music exhibits itself as a (formal) play of signs; materiality is turned into an extrinsic carrier of occurrences: it does not matter anymore. As Waldenfels noticed: “In all theories that assume the being-what as a primary mode of being, the voice has a difficult position. Because a voice sounds, . . . continues to sound, stops and resonates, in short it presents itself as an event, something which happens” (Waldenfels 2006:

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195). To put it more generally: a sound is not substantial, “it is” never ever an object, for “it is” never present. As soon as “it is” heard, it is already gone, dead, as Derrida would name it. Thus we do not have any hook to lock our ontological machinery onto sonic experience; we can not localize, and therefore can not identify or re-identify sounds. As Strawson (1964) recognized early on: sounds cannot serve as particulars in any ontology whatever; they are doomed to a deficient mode of existence. In order to construct a “working ontology” we need space: only this allows for co-ordination, separation, re-identification, and thus for “thingness,” i.e. objectivity. Sounds in themselves are unreal.

Visual objectivism Once we have dived into some of these rather confusing inadequacies and even incoherences of our legacy ontologies, we are forced to ask for alternatives: is there any escape? As Whitehead (1978) and Tyler (1984) already suggested, we definitely have to analyze the language we use to articulate our conceptual frameworks.

Genealogy Hence we should start to (re-)construct a genealogy of those concepts, e.g. by identifying events where basic “girders” of the current discursive formation were scaffolded. Furthermore, Whitehead suggested as well that we have to rethink the relation between permanence and fluency. Along these lines, we are almost inevitably pointed to one of the most influential pre-socratic “debates,” which two and a half thousand years ago took place between Parmenides and Heraclitus. As is well known, both represent an opposite stance concerning Being and Becoming, respectively, with Heraclitus as the proponent of Everything

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Flows—one of the first generalized ontological positions in Western Philosophy anyway. We will not pursue all this further here. Instead, in our analysis we will focus on an often neglected aspect of this ontological framework: its inherent Ophtalmocentrism as it is already revealed in Parmenides’ famous fragment (Diels 1974: 231): “. . . tò gàr autó noeĩn estín te kaì eĩnai”; which is usually translated as: “For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be” (Parmenides and Burnet 1892 Chapter IV ). Postponing for a moment the imposition of the Potentialis (can be thought . . . can be) the most remarkable aspect is the identification of noeĩn and thinking (thought). Burnet (and, of course others as well) suggest a “calm surface” of a fixed and arrested “truth” there, yet Parmenides’ fragment reveals a quite forceful (perceptual) dynamics which got harnessed and crystallized in his concepts of unity, eternity, and unsurpassable perfection; in the first place noéo gains its semantics from seeing: to perceive by the eyes, observe, notice. This genuine setup of Parmenides’ (implicit) visual bias—surely reflecting a cognitive attitude of the ancient Greeks in general—became manifest in the ontological framework of Plato and Aristoteles. Both of them established a long-range setting of concepts, thereby imposing a still enduring oculo- rsp. Ophtalmocentrism on occidental thinking which only as late as a century ago came into the focus of serious criticism.

Analysis This criticism of “The Nobility of Sight,” as Jonas (1954) framed it— accompanies the imperialism of the eye since its very beginnings. A comprehensive portrayal of its genealogy, and in particular of the critique articulated in French poststructuralism, can be found in Jay (1993). For historical details we refer the reader to this volume; here, we only want to highlight some important aspects which should become relevant in the course of our argument.

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Sedimented in deep layers of our cultural strata, there materialize— according to Jonas—three characteristics of sight which have a strong impact on our everyday conceptual formation (Jonas 1954: 507), viz. simultaneity in the presentation of a manifold, neutralization of the causality of sense-affection, and distance in the spatial and mental senses. Each of them constitutes important peculiarities of our experiential prehensions (cf. Whitehead 1978)—usually interpreted as the very basics of our reality. The visual field, for instance, is intimately related to our “idea” of juxtaposition and co-existence, resulting in the concept of extensionality, i.e. space. As we have already seen with Strawson, the latter is thought of as a necessary condition for the constitution of an ontology of particulars—because of its potential for separation and co-ordination. With respect to time, vision is also constitutive for the emergence of a now, an instant, a “co-temporaneous manifold . . . at rest” (Jonas 1954: 507). As Jonas argues, “sight” is unique with respect to simultaneity. “All other senses construct their perceptual unities out of a temporal sequence of sensations.” This, in turn, implies that “the whole content is never simultaneously present, but always partial and incomplete” (Jonas 1954: 508). Thus, Jonas concludes, sight offers us a “degree of detachment of the signified from the sign” (loc. cit.) that eventually seeds the idea of persistent existence which we would never get at if we had to rely on temporal senses only. In a similar vein, Jonas analyzes other aspects of our conceptual apparatus, often drawing on ideas from Whitehead (passim), in particular his distinction between presentational immediacy and causal efficacy (Whitehead 1985)—as he himself documents in his paper (Jonas 1950). Jonas quite convincingly traces concepts like objectivity, being (vs. becoming), form, thing, (empathetic) distance, disengagement—to mention only the most relevant—back to their visual “roots.” In conclusion, then—as Whitehead already emphasizes in his later writings and as becomes central in his own metaphysics (Whitehead, passim)—the bottom line is that Occidental Metaphysics turns the whole “concept” of reality upside down: the—

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phenomenologically—most real prehension that we have in our experience, namely touch—as Aristoteles already knew (De Anima), and as recent physics rediscovers (Fuchs 2011)—was deprecated and, in the same breath, substituted with a very specific, subordinated sensorium—sight—merely in order to create a complex conceptual machinery whose only purpose is the re-construction of this very experience in terms of substance/attribute metaphors. This analysis can be both deepened and broadened, as Ihde (1976), for instance, has shown. According to him, it seems to be impossible to treat sonic experience in isolation, at least from a phenomenological point of view. Instead it would be appropriate to re-balance our various accounts of sensory experience. He also tries to counter Strawson’s argument with his own phenomenological approach. A no-space situation, as it is constructed by Strawson, seems extremely inappropriate, because it neglects many contemporary insights into the sophisticated spatial capabilities of the (human) ear (Ihde 1976: 58). “Directionality and location, particularly advanced in such animals as . . . bats . . ., have shown the degree to which echo-location is a very precise spatial sense” (loc. cit.). It remains open, though, and it should not be discussed further here, to what extent such scientific investigations of animals, and here in particular of bats, justify talk of a “precise spatial sense.” This sort of research is, at least, mediated by a complex transpathic interpretation and remapping of experimental data onto our very specific human sensorium; it is genuinely a visualization. And—as is also the case with comparable situations—a behavioral morphism between bats and human beings does not imply necessarily a morphism on the sensory level as well.

Sonic naturalism What should have become more explicit now is the enormous difficulty of approaching sonic experience (and not sonic “phenomena”) theoretically, just because our scientific language (e.g. “theory”) seems

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categorically inappropriate for thinking sound, or, as we will discuss later, for thinking process in general.

chóra It was noticed earlier that the specific subject-predicate-object structure of our Standard Average European languages (Tyler 1984) imposes a substance-attributive thinking, a thinking in terms of objects and their properties (ibid.). And there is overwhelming “evidence” that, additionally, the deepest “geology” of our conceptual apparatus is interstratified with evolved visual structures and elements, inducing a preference for endurance, distance, and “objectivity.” Our “everyday” as well as “scientific” thinking is heavily entangled with a Metaphysics of Light (Blumenberg 1957). What we want to suggest in the concluding part of this paper is a research strategy that combines an insight into the breakdown of traditional (visual) metaphysics (and, consequently, the scientific discourses based on this very metaphysics), with a decided challenge to rethink sound in terms of process. Firmly convinced that such an endeavor can only succeed if we “rewind” to the point in history where the crucial decisions were made, and convinced also that this strategy does not imply a complete rejection of sight (and its implications), we would—similar to Plato’s procedure in his “Timaios” (Plato 1902)—“pose” a thoroughly displaced, perhaps lunatic question. As Sloterdijk, paraphrasing a suggestion by Hannah Arendt, entitles one of his essays: “Where are we when we are listening to music?” (Sloterdijk 2007), we would seize (subversively) his suggestion, and would ask Where “is” Sound? Hereby we will join the Platonic discussion on chóra—the “non-space,” the ultimate receptacle, bare in-definiteness, différance (Derrida 1995) and creativity (Whitehead 1967). Guided by both of these latter authors, we will start thinking sound as echémata: poù echémata . . . where sounding? Re-membering— inwards—pure immanence; no-where getting in touch: zing!—a sonic naturalism.

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Process As Whitehead has suggested: what we have to rethink is a new balance of fluency vs. permanence, of generation vs. substance (Whitehead 1978: 208). And fortunately, as a matter of course, we do not have to start from scratch. Beyond Whitehead, there are strong allies in French poststructuralism and feminism, like Derrida (1978, and passim), with his concept of différance Kristeva (1984) with her Revolution in Poetic Language, and Irigaray (1985) with her “Mechanics of Fluids.” There is the heavy stratum of Deleuzian/Guattarian-inspired ontologies also, and the emerging field of vibrational ontologies (Goodman 2010; Bennett 2009); the list could be longer. Moreover, there are fields beyond those ontological and metaphysical narratives, which might inseminate research in sonic naturalism. Space is limited here, so we could only “touch” those disciplines, mention in passing Non-Commutative Geometry (Connes 1994), Category Theory, in particular Monoidal Categories with application in Graphical Languages (Selinger 2009), Linear Logic and Quantum Coherent Spaces (Girard 2011), and many conceptual experiments in Physics, above all Quantum Information (Nielsen and Chuang 2000), Quantum Computation (Markopoulou 2012), and Quantum Gravity (Rovelli 2004). This last field deserves to be mentioned in particular: as a highly speculative undertaking, Quantum Gravity seems to be extremely open for conceptual tinkering. Unsettled by the vain attempts to interpret Quantum Mechanics consistently, and challenged by the deep incoherence between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, Quantum Gravity seems to have potential as a highly inspiring field for ontological engineering—a conceptual constructivism completely in line with Stengers’ interpretation of Whitehead (Stengers and Latour 2011).

Autoactivity One of the most confusing implications of Locke’s bifurcation (primary vs. secondary qualities), in conjunction with Descartes’

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substantial dualism, is the separation of the world in a passive, dead “stuff ” (nature, or data), and an active agency (human being, mechanism, process) manipulating data in order to achieve some desired result. Along these lines, the world is deeply heteroactive, to an extent that Aristoteles felt comfortable to base his proof of the existence of “god” on this relationship; albeit ironically—in a way—he introduced simultaneously one of the first cosmological singularities: the unmoved mover. Recent attempts to fake non-heteroactive processes (usually categorized under the concept of “self-organization”) on a pure Newtonian, mechanistic basis hide the emerging complexities in a strange conceptual “vapor,” simply because true autoactivity cannot be created. Either it relies on some sort of hidden dynamics, or it just fails. This situation has changed thoroughly with Quantum Physics. Among its heavily corroborated backbone features we find a nonepistemological, ontological indeterminism. For most physicists it was like a kick in the teeth, and it still is. Einstein, as is quite familiar to most of us, even did not believe, and spent a lot of time and energy to “repair” this breakdown of nature. Yet, by putting back the facts on their feet, many highly interesting ideas emerged, commencing with Schrödinger’s strange “Zitterbewegung” (Rusin and Zawadzki 2014), continued by Wheeler with his introduction of the universe as self-excited circuit (and the self-creation of the participant observer) (Wheeler 1978: 22), right up to the most recent Free Will Theorem by Conway and Kochen (2008). All these concepts and ideas (even theorems) comply amazingly well with Whitehead’s process ontology and its heavily-loaded, often strange and difficult to read explication (Whitehead 1978): the crucial difference between actuality and actualization; the implacable orientation of actual entities toward a (potential) self-creation in line with constraints of a nexus of luring contemporaries; culminating in their final satisfaction as a free decision for “buzzing off,” thereby joining the ever growing archive of dead, actualized actualities. (And yes!—this comprises ontologically any scale; from macro-, to meso-, micro-,

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nano-, or even Planck-Scale. It allows, e.g., for a free will of electrons, as the latter was elaborated by Conway and Kochen.) Additionally, there are strong interferences with Whitehead and Postmodern thinking. Catherine Keller (2002), introducing Bracken (2002) and Pedraja (2002), already pointed to the highly promising intersections between Derrida’s concept of différance and Whitehead’s process ontology. And both Derrida (1995) and Whitehead (1967: 187) explicitly referred to Plato’s chóra as a crucial aspect of their own thinking. By considering existing approaches to overcoming a Metaphysics of Light, we should identify subtle hazards that should be avoided, though. Mersch (passim), for instance, in his attempt to install some sort of thinking performativity or thinking the event, still seems to be trapped in a binary (dialectical) Hegelian logic, and still— as has already been pointed out—subscribes to a substance/attribute ontology, with all its implications. And it is not obvious to what extent Derrida, through his phenomenological and structuralist legacies, could be continued in a constructive manner, in order to introduce “multivalued” logics of open-and-ed disjunctions, for instance, in the sense of Deleuze (1990), or in order to overcome his deeply embedded anthropocentrism. This last point seems to be of general relevance. Most of the existing approaches neglect the contemporary change in scale. We begin to live in a nano-biological age. Molecular techniques come close to enabling a serious modification of what (human) subjectivity was traditionally thought to be. The borders between species get blurred. And one, perhaps the most pressing challenge of the near future might be to establish a non-mechanistic, organic ontology which would allow us to overcome the strong convergence toward a “technopoietic” exploitation on the nano-scale, a thinking nature in purely technical terms (what Posthumanism is most often about). This would require a decisive counterpoint to a traditional, non-creative and conservative tessellation of the nano-scale. A counterpoint to the implementation of a being-what nano-mosaic, substantializing and objectifying nature, and leading eventually to an until now unimaginable nano-fascism. It would thus require a decisive contrast (Whitehead) to

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the prolongation of an already established technoscientific vector, an op-position to a continuation of our war against nature. Whitehead, with his socially oriented concept of nature—dynamic multiplicities, with fuzzy borders, on all scales—might give us conceptual instruments to tackle these challenges. Thus, sonic thinking—maybe in line with already existing vibrational ontologies— would be done in a much broader context than just . . . thinking sound.

Works cited Aristoteles (1956), De Anima, W. D. Ross (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barbour, J. (2000), The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bennett, J. (2009), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Blumenberg, H. (1957), “Licht als Metapher der Wahrheit. Im Vorfeld der philosophischen Begriffsbildung,” Studium Generale 10: 432–47. Bracken, J. A. (2002), “Whitehead and the Critique of Logocentrism,” in C. Keller and A. Daniell (eds), Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms, 91–110. New York: State University of New York Press Albany. Burnet, J. (1902), Platonis Opera. Vol. 4, Clitopho, Respublica, Timaeus, Critias. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connes, A. (1994), Noncommutative Geometry. Available online: http:// www.123library.org/book_details/?id=40123 (accessed July 14, 2015). Conway, J. and S. Kochen (2008), The Strong Free Will Theorem. Available online: http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.3286v1 (accessed July 14, 2015). Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2007 [1987]), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1973), Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1978), Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1981), Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Derrida, J. (1995), “Khōra,” in T. Dutoit (ed.), On the Name, 89–127. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Diels, H. (1974 [1903]), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: Griechisch und Deutsch. Erster Band. Zürich: Weidmann. Ellis, G. F. R. and T. Rothman (2010), “Time and Spacetime: The Crystallizing Block Universe,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 49(5): 988–1003. Fuchs, C. A. (2011), Coming of Age with Quantum Information. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Girard, J. (2011), The Blind Spot: Lectures on Logic. Zürich: European Mathematical Society. Goodman, N. (1978), Ways of Worldmaking. Cambridge, MA : Hackett Publishing. Goodman, S. (2010), Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Hanslick, E. (1891), The Beautiful in Music: A Contribution to the Revisal of Musical Aesthetics. Enlarged and Revised Seventh Edition. London: Novello and Company, Ltd. Havelock, E. A. (1963), Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Ihde, D. (1976), Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens: Ohio University Press. Irigaray, L. (1985), “The Mechanics of Fluids,” in L. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 106–18, trans. C. Porter. Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press. Jay, M. (1993), Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jonas, H. (1950), “Causality and Perception,” Journal of Philosophy 47(11): 319–24. Jonas, H. (1954), “The Nobility of Sight,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14(4): 507–19. Keller, C. (2002), “Introduction,” in C. Keller and A. Daniell (eds), Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms, 1–29. New York: State University of New York Press Albany. Kristeva, J. (1984), Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Walker. New York: Columbia University Press. Markopoulou, F. (2012), “The Computing Spacetime,” Lectures in Computer Science. Available online: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3398v1 (accessed July 14, 2015).

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Mersch, D. (2002), Was sich zeigt: Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis. München: Fink. Mersch, D. (2006), “Präsenz und Ethizität der Stimme,” in D. Kolesch and S. Krämer (eds), Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen, 211–36. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Nielsen, M. A. and I. L. Chuang (2000), Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nudds, M. and C. O’Callaghan (2009), Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parmenides and Burnet (1892), in J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, Chap. IV. Available online as: http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenidesunicode.htm (accessed July 14, 2015). Availability by S. Béreau (ed.) Le Poème. Greek Original and English Translation, trans. J. Burnet. Pedraja, L. G. (2002), “Whitehead, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism,” in C. Keller and D. Anne (eds), Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms, 73–90. New York: State University of New York Press Albany. Plato (1902), “Timaios,” in J. Burnet (ed.), Platonis Opera, vol. 4, 17–105. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rovelli, C. (2004), Quantum Gravity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rovelli, C. (2009), “Forget Time.” Available online: http://arxiv.org/ abs/0903.3832v3 (accessed July 14, 2015). Rusin, T. M. and W. Zawadzki (2014), “Zitterbewegung of Electrons in Carbon Nanotubes Created by Laser Pulses.” Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter 26(21): 215–301. Available online: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4709v2 (accessed July 14, 2015). Selinger, P. (2009), “A Survey of Graphical Languages for Monoidal Categories.” Available online: http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.3347 (accessed July 14, 2015). Sokal, A. D. and J. Bricmont (1998), Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science. London: Picador. Sloterdijk, P. (2007), “Wo sind wir, wenn wir Musik hören?,” in P. Sloterdijk and P. Weibel (eds), Der ästhetische Imperativ, 50–82. Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Stengers, I. and B. Latour (Foreword) (2011), Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. M. Chase. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Strawson, P. F. (1964 [1959]), Individuals. London: Methuen.

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Tyler, S. A. (1984), “The vision Quest in the West, or What the Mind’s Eye Sees.” Journal of Anthropological Research: 23–40. Waldenfels, B. (2006), “Das Lautwerden der Stimme,” in D. Kolesch and S. Krämer (eds), Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen, 191–210. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wheeler, J. A. (1978), Frontiers of Time. Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Texas at Austin. Whitehead, A. N. (1967 [1933]), Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1978 [1929]), Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, D. W. Sherburne and D. R. Griffin (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1985 [1927]), Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Sound Beyond Nature | Sound Beyond Culture or: Why is the Prague Golem Mute? Jakob Ullmann

I have to start by begging the reader’s pardon. First, as the outlines I will give are short and abridged—in more than one case the brevity of my explanations may stand in high tension to the complexity and the significance of the questions I ask. The second reason, which makes it necessary to beg your pardon, is—as I would say—the a-synchronicity or non-simultaneity of my approach to the present situation of sound and its discussion. It seems to me that we undergo for the second time in Europe (better: in western Europe) a fundamental change in the relation to sound “itself,” to art, which deals with sound and the sociological results of the new situation and use of sound. We deal with sound differently: we are confronted with sound in a different way than in the centuries before. Perhaps we have to state that our relation to sound differs from the very diverging relations man could have to sound throughout history. For the first time sound, however it “sounds,” can be produced, repeated, even fixed in a moment of free duration. We deal with this sound, we hear this sound as if it can be the same: produced by machines or by persons, by instruments, which need breath or motion of human limbs or instruments, which only have to switch on or off. Sound seems to be nothing else than a limited series of numbers, of zeros and ones, every time and everywhere available and in the same way identical with itself, as zeros and ones are identical with itself. The sound results of this fundamental change have a clear and pure surface; it is clean like a 181

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picture gone through the procedures of Photoshop-editing. I suspect that sound has lost at least a lot of its ambiguity and its non-availability in this process of change. But before we can come to this point—and so to my a little bit old fashioned considerations—we have to assert, that in one aspect sound and its relation to human beings has not changed at all: you cannot escape from it. Sound will follow you everywhere. You cannot shut your ears and even if you try it by the help of the hands, the sounds of the environment, the sounds of culture and of nature will find the way to your brain. It is not difficult to explain that this physical condition of the human body in the dawn of mankind had advantages over the sense of vision. Man had a sense of 360° to get wind of a danger. Even during the periods of sleep the ears stay open and give you the possibility to try to cover in expectation of danger. The brain is even faster in processing the aural impressions than the pictures, which reach the brain through the eyes. So the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound is balanced. But—as especially somebody who suffers Tinnitus knows very well—we have to pay a high price for the ever-open ears. We are not even able to decide clearly if the sound is inside or outside of us. Sound surrounds us, sound traces us and we have no possibility to escape. Perhaps sound does not denote danger, even less danger for body and life but it became an un-ignorable, an obvious part of everyday-life as well as part of every kind of artistic and scientific activities. Perhaps only the addition of these two tendencies: the omnipresence of sound and its reduction to a clean surface without any background made it possible to use it as a weapon. I wondered why—after the legendary use of sound to destroy walls by the help of trumpets in the Middle East more than 2000 years ago— sound and sound-machines are used only to frighten the enemies and not to harm or to kill them. It was our time which changed this in a fundamental way: during the Iraq war the US army used the “Ride of the Valkyries” by Richard Wagner to conquer inhabited areas in northern Iraq (Rötzer 2005). The US army copied the famous movie by

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Francis Ford Coppola “Apocalypse Now,” so we can ask what it means for reality if reality copies fiction and not vice versa, but this is not our theme today. My assumption is, that this use of sound as a weapon was possible not earlier than sound lost its old ambiguity, its not removable background, which made it really dangerous to use sound also for those who tried to use it. Could one be sure that sound will not strike back, that sound will not harm the operator of sound? The history of sound and the history of music are full of examples, which can, which should be, seen as cautionary tales. Perhaps better than elsewhere we can see here the necessity to ask old-fashioned questions, to ask for the ambiguities of sound and its tendency to deprive itself from other phenomena of reality and from the listener who tries to catch the sound or even his experience of listening. So to say “in former times” we had no chance to fix the sound, we had to fix its source, its parentage and origin as fast as possible because it had gone before we became aware of it in the right way. The attempt to locate the sound as a special sound, as an element of a system of signs, of a ladder of different steps of danger in nature or culture seems to be a first attempt to domesticate the wildness of sound. Where is it coming from? Is it a sign of a matter of fact or is it a fact in itself? Does the thunder speak, does the volcano roar? Are the birds singing for themselves or are they speaking to us? Is there any system of communication which contains the avalanche, a mountain creep as well as the sounds of stars, the singing of whales as well as the singing of human beings for Dionysos, other gods or their lovers? It is clear that in such a system the question of sounds of nature and sounds of culture cannot be asked. As Athanasius Kircher shows in his huge Musurgia Universalis, these sounds are all attributed to creation, which is an established order of things, events, animate beings, humans, and even superhuman creatures. Sound loses its connotation of danger when it becomes attached to an ordered divine activity. But in reality you cannot change or move sounds—you are not allowed to as Morton Feldman states!—as Kircher did with the organ of creation; there the keyboard is changed for

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reasons of symmetry (Kircher 1650: 367). So Kircher has to answer the question why birds can make so marvelous music but mammals do not. Kircher suggests that mammals are also able to make music; he gives a proof by quoting a friend who tried to proselytize the South American aborigines. This friend told the roman polymath that he found a sloth, which was able (in the times of Kircher) to sing the hexachord correctly (Kircher 1650: 26). In the times of Charles Darwin the apes learned— from the sloth?—to sing the 12 notes of the scale in equal temperament (Darwin 1981: 332). Sounds of culture and sounds of nature cannot be distinguished in this order of life and of reality. Sounds have lost their danger because the only sound, which is not a response expected and ordered by God the creator, is the Word of creation itself. It is clear that it is beyond nature as well as culture containing creation. It comes into the world in a double and strange way: not as a sound but as flesh and blood. To understand this theory it needs more time than we have here and more intelligence than I can offer, so we can put this idea away for a little bit; we will have to come back to it after explaining the first fundamental change in European apprehension of sound and the handling of it. One of the problems with sound—perhaps not only in the time before its technical reproducibility—is that we not only have few or even no time to identify its source, to decide if it is a sign of something or presence of somebody or if it is a matter of fact, a “thing” itself, but that we feel in a somewhat strange way that there is “something” behind the sound, a background which is not only indicated by the sound but an area of reality or even beyond “reality” which gives the sound a special and indomitable force and power. We do not know why, but we all agree that sounds can “change the mind” or “change the soul,” even change the state of the whole world. We can—in the better case!—only observe this event or process; in the worse case we are victims of the strange, wild, primordial powers which are not only indicated by sound but executed. It is not difficult to understand why Plato tries to avoid, to reject, even to forbid these powers from his program of education and his ideal of a political system (Plato 1962: 397c). He knew as a man with

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skills in mathematics and—not to forget!—in psychology well enough that the sound can overcome man but man cannot overcome sound. Is this background of sound “nature” an area which is so archaic that it has primordial force, force from the neighborhood of the old chaos that it predates and resists the operations of reason? Or is it even beyond “nature” because it has power on bodies and souls? This is not easy to understand and even more difficult to decide. What we can see is, that this question has a strong relation to the fact, that “sound,” even the artistic, the “musical sound,” takes no part in what is called “mimesis” in the theory of art and representation, not only in antiquity. What we learn from Plato’s “Republic” is that the musician, the Auletos as well as the player of the lyre, does not and cannot depict or reproduce any sound of nature. He can and he will change minds, he will become himself like a drunkard in a tavern and will move his listeners as well in such persons, but he will not imitate or reproduce the sounds of drinking holes. So the sound resists not only the clear and illuminated identification of its parentage and origin, it seems to be impossible to speak about it in the same way as about real objects, things or facts of the world of matter and the world of imagination. You cannot make the sound to an object of consideration as others about which you can speak and think sine ira et studio without being affected by the object you speak about. Sound is close to language where the abyss of confusion of the levels of speaking and understanding is threatening. The problem is not to become the well-known Cretan, who tells us that every Cretan is a liar. The problem is that you cannot eliminate the fear that in the moment you speak about sound you are affected by this (or the) sound in a way that your considerations about your object of thinking are infected so intensely that your considerations cannot stay in the area of scientific research, of philosophical thinking. Sound seems to be even stronger than love! In the “Symposium” Plato lets us participate in the debate between Aristophanes, Alcibiades and Socrates about the appropriate way to discuss the “Eros” (Plato 1976: 189d, 214e). We know that Eros is close to the gods; he is a daemon. And even this daemon we can transfer in a

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rational, in an un-affective discourse on human love and conditions of humanity in its entirety. Perhaps we should be more careful in respect to the dramaturgy of the philosophical text. Neither Aristophanes nor Alcibiades, not even Socrates is the person who explains to us the most important things: it is the woman Diotima who is able to go a step further than Aristophanes, Alcibiades and Socrates (Plato 1976: 202a). But after stones and animals, after natural forces and powers, even after Gods in Heaven and Hades, the woman is forced to turn and to follow the miracle-working power of Orpheus’s sounds. Is Orpheus not sure about the supernatural power of sound, is he obtained by the knowledge that his instruments will ever and ever repeat the cry of the killed beings which had been the precondition to give him the power to produce sounds? Why did Orpheus turn around? It is said, that the Thracian maenads killed Orpheus. Why could not he appease them after appeasing the animate and the inanimate worlds and its inhabitants? I want to express a slightly temerarious speculation: the combination of the power from beyond nature with the cultural practice of art loses its inevitable force in the moment in which this power comes in conflict or in contact with beings which can speak and which are determined by this ability. Greek Gods are speaking too, but it is not their destiny. Their destiny is a speaking which creates and which destroys. The other awful story about sound and sound-practice in Greece seems to me to aim in the same direction: the atrocious fate of Marsyas, which on the one hand tells us something about the important role of the interval called third in sound-art (which is later called music), but on the other hand it tells us that the Greek world tried to domesticate the wild and by reason undefeated sound through the LOGOS. This LOGOS seems also to resist the dichotomy of nature and culture because in the Greek world it is not culture or nature which threatens all at the end, but the future: death. The God, who is the Lord of the LOGOS, is the one whose bow (its name is “life” but its work is death) hurts from far (Heraklit 1922: 22 B48). But also the LOGOS is ambiguous: it is the counterforce of reason by using words with sounds. The indissoluble combination of words and sounds is seen as the correction of the fact

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that reason alone cannot overcome sound. But the sound itself can—as Marsyas had shown!—express the LOGOS. Not only the LOGOS of mankind and language, but the LOGOS of the world! Did not the order of the world in the harmony of spheres show in an unsurpassed way that LOGOS and SOUND are one as proof that the world is not a chaotic agglomeration and a cluster of senseless atoms? Plato has shown us in his unequaled myth at the end of his “Republic” that this syzygy of sound and logos, of present, past and future, of heaven and earth, of life and death is—like the rope of the Greek triremes, where the word comes from—in harmony with beauty and the good in truth (Plato 1962: 616b). One can experience, one can even see this harmony, but not before death; this Platonic kind of sound is heard and seen in a life after death. The Platonic LOGOS needs to exceed the death row of Apollo; nature and culture are not equal in respect of death; nature and culture are equal in coordination under the system and structure of the unsurpassable good which is—as the Greeks say—“epekeina tīs ousias” (Plato, 1962: 509b), beyond nature as well as culture. It is interesting that it took only around 300 years for the roman author and politician Cicero to give a much more pessimistic version of this vision (Cicero 1979: 340–345). He does not deny the harmony of spheres, the belt connecting heaven and earth. The belt, which is expression and guarantee of the order of the world, is not cut, but it is limited to the regions above the moon and beyond the ear. Human beings cannot hear the sound, which is the assertion that even under the moon in the chaotic world of human history and society a harmonic ground of existence is preserved. Cicero explains this fact with a kind of familiarization. As the people who live next to the waterfall of the Nile River (“Catadupa”), so the whole of mankind became deaf to the enormous sound of the spheres. But this is not convincing. If the sound from beyond the sphere of mankind—human nature and human culture—is so great that human beings become deaf, why can we hear nature and culture? The myth of Plato, as well as the myth of Cicero, tries to give the reader a source of the mythological knowledge. This is a little bit

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contradictory. If a myth is a myth, then it is a message from nowhere. A message from “somewhere” cannot be a myth in the full sense of the word. In the case of Plato it is much easier to understand than in the case of Cicero. If Plato tells us a “myth,” then he says to us in the same moment, that it is something that exceeds discourse, speech of philosophy and scientific research—in the moment anyway. For Cicero the case is much more difficult: the greatest and highest sound is from nature, but it does not only exceed natural experience, it destroys the fundamental conditions of aural experiences. So not only is this sound cultural as a result of non-aural cogitation, it is only a reminiscence of an old golden age, in which the order of the world was not yet disturbed by the order of man. We cannot be surprised that exactly in the moment in which nature became again a counterpart of man after the resignation of God in the eighteenth century, the great myth of music as a message to all mankind created a similar situation as in antiquity, but a situation with inverse signatures. Sound does not emerge from nature, (musical) sound cannot copy nature (the attempts to do this are really ridiculous in the eighteenth century); sound is art at the highest level, because sound is only, so to say, a real, insinuating phenomenon if it is totally artificial, not to say artistic. For the first time (in western Europe) sound-structure itself can form semantic patterns which are independent from extramusical knowledge and extra-musical structures. But to make this possible sound has to have a receiver who is able to speak. The supposed sound-language beyond the ordinary languages of listeners of all countries and all times can—more felt than understood—be heard only if the one who gets the message is a being who is designated by being able to speak. Romantic music can be seen in this respect as a symmetrical situation to what we have seen in antiquity. There we had the chain, the “yoke” over the borderline of nature. Here we have the same situation with regard to culture. The ambiguity and the wild, forceful past of sound are tempered by their reconnection to a cultural practice in which the change of feeling replaced the change of being.

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This turn around was only possible in Europe due to the first fundamental change with regard to sound “itself,” but much more to the art, which is connected with sound. There is no time to explain the complex history of sound-art from late antiquity to the beginning of the medieval era, but I think (perhaps we will have some discussion later) I can assert that all European music takes part in the decision of early Christianity to reject music at all. The WORD, what was mentioned above, came in flesh and blood but not in sound. So the word of what is again and again in the early Christian communities called the “message,” the “word of the cross” has to be stripped of and located far from sound. The sound is what pronounces the message, but the sound is not allowed to change the message or to add something. Because the sound—from the viewpoint of early Christianity—cannot be cured from its exceeding beyond nature and beyond culture, it has to be rejected at all. We all know very well that this rejection changed sound-art or established a new sonic art (perhaps), but sound came back through the holes of mouths, later of pipes and strings. So it can be instructive to look—at the end of my perhaps too much-abridged outlines—to a remarkable and strange phenomenon of the High Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century the great Jewish cabbalist Abraham Aboulafia dreamed of a clearly operated, rational but nevertheless mystical working prophecy by the help of sound. He invented a whole cosmos of strategies of reading, singing and reciting which should be used to come so close to God that the proof of this “unio” could be (here the situation is not really clear) the creation of a being which is as close to human beings as it is said in the first book of the Torah about father Abraham at Haran. Normally this being is called a Golem. Abraham Aboulafia created his “ars” (in the Latin sense of the word) on the background of the newly invented or discovered western European music, which is based on atomic, combinable particles or elements (Aboulafia 2009). He tried to combine sound and its elements to a prophecy which is founded in structure like language of letters but much more sonic inspired and sonic excited. Mystic thinking and

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operability (practicality?), heritage of antiquity and Jewish Absoluteness (Unbedingtheit) are pushed into abstraction, but remain rooted in the religious world of Jewish life and thinking—a world of imagination as reproducible, repeatable forms of thinking. In Plato’s myth the sound as structure of all beings and the unity of all being can reach experience. Here, 1,500 years later, as sound, the series of notes becomes a “melody” which ceaselessly configures the letter-complexes of creation, which equips these elements with a background, which establishes an audible resonance as space of creative prophecy. In this way, it was possible to avoid the mythology of sound as well as to respect the non-transgressing line which separates creator and creation, despite the respect of letters and the respect of the revealing power of words. Also some hundreds of years later, when legends, which are much closer to the abyss of magic and popular beliefs, are widespread, it seems to me that the specialty of sound and its strength, the letter and its combinations to connect with the whole existence of human beings and to change it, is well remembered. One of the most important characteristics of the Golem of Prague was the fact that he was mute. The magic text of his creation was sound, because it was spoken and became audible. But the result of the magic procedure was not allowed to create a resonance in the creation. The real existence in the real world distinguishes the space of the Golem of Prague from the space of the rational prophecy of Abraham Aboulafia. The Golem of Prague is subject of the LAW. But it is a law which is not made for him and which he cannot comply. The resonance, the echo of his existence is death as the inscription on his forehead showed. We are—strangely enough—back at the point where we left sound in antiquity. It seems that today, since sound is a nearly valueless coin of every-day experience, it is difficult to remember times and situations where sound became a question of life and death. I myself remember very well times in which even the imagination and writing of something which could become sound tended to become a question of life and death. But this is another story.

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Works cited Aboulafia, A. (2007 [1284]), Sepher haOth, G. Lahy (ed. and trans.), Roquevaire: Éditions Lahy. Aboulafia, A. (2009), Hayyé ha-Ôlam ha-Ba: La Vie du Monde à Venir, G. Lahy (ed. and trans.). Roquevaire: Éditions Lahy. Cicero, M. T. (1979), “Somnium Scipionis,” in K. Büchner (ed. and trans.): De Re Publica, Stuttgart: Reclam. Darwin, C. (1981), The Descent of Man and the Selection in Relation to Sex, J. T. Bonner and R. M. May (eds), vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heraklit (1922), “Fragmente,” in H. Diehls and W. Kranz (eds), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Berlin: Weidmann. Kircher, A. (1650), Musurgia Universalis, Rome: Corbelletti, Grignani. Plato (1976), “Symposium,” in J. Burnet (ed.), Opera, tom. II . Oxford: Clarendon Press. Plato (1962), “Politeia,” in J. Burnet (ed.), Opera, tom. IV. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rötzer, F. (2005), “Sound-Laser.” Available online: http://www.heise.de/tp/ artikel/20/20992/1.html (accessed September 28, 2015).

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One Dimensional Music Without Context or Meaning Mark Fell

Jacob: Time is underground and above us. Mother: No Jacob, time is all around us. Jacob: And only time lords can see it! Mother: There are no time lords Jacob. A conversation overheard on a train in South Yorkshire, UK . In 2013 I made a short silent film that I claimed was about music, time, and technology. Shot entirely on the remote Finnish island of Hailuoto, it interweaves text with the island’s frozen, inert, and haunting landscapes. As a meditation on time and music placed within a space that is both motionless and silent (a place without time and music), the work’s central dichotomy was intended to parody how music is often characterized as timeless, universal, or spiritual—a view that, in my opinion, is particularly problematical. Drawing from anthropology, philosophy, and computer music software the film presents a brief analysis of the temporal mechanics of musical and technical systems. It opens with a rejection of Varèse’s famous remark that “music is organised sound” and I want to begin my discussion at this point. For me saying that music is organized sound is a bit like saying that food is organized flavor: it is an aesthetic description that ignores the intake of necessary dietary requirements, the role-play around the consumption of food, the pathologies of over or under eating, the distinction between junk and fine dining and so on. Similarly, being strictly Varèsian I think “music as organised sound” is like claiming that car parks are organized white paint: ostensibly these are the materials 193

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that are “organized” to form the thing we call a car park. But imagine that one day the painter of those white lines decides to get “experimental” and make markings that are quite unlike anything found in nearly all other car parks. The car park inspector would probably be unhappy with such lines on the grounds that the thing they construct is in no way carpark-like. The Varèsian car park painter’s reply “but car parks are organized white paint” would do little to appease the inspector. Why? Because the organization of white paint in car parks is itself part of a wider organization of behaviors, codes, conventions and so on that enable people to meaningfully interact with one another within the social space of the parking area. The Varèsian “music as organised sound” sentiment ignores all this. I would like to propose that we reject attempts to define “music” by appealing to some abstract, universalizing or formalist agenda. We should not ask what music is, but what music does. For me this question led to thinking about the relationships between music and commonly held beliefs about time. And, to lay my cards on the table from the outset, how music might function as a framework within which time-experience is both constructed or interpreted. The following text, which I began to write around 2010, was my attempt to think about these issues and how they related to my practise as a musician and artist, and I hope it is of some interest for that reason. My work at that time, particularly the two releases Multistability (Raster Noton, 2010) and UL8 (Editions Mego, 2010), explored very unusual rhythmic patterns that did not follow the conventions found in most house and techno (the traditions within which my work is predominantly grounded). Here, by contrast, patterns were of variable duration, events were specified in milliseconds not tempo, and structures were not subdivided into ratios of a larger overall duration. Similarly, in my visual practice, I was making works of extended duration with minimal change that aimed to challenge the audience’s attention. My thinking around this subject was also sparked off after reading Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, a book that my friend Yasunao Tone recommended to me. Subsequently Husserl’s text became caught up in my own thinking. I began to ask myself the

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following questions: What is time? How do we experience it? How does music function within this experience? What beliefs are present within that experience? On reflection I admit that some of these questions are somewhat naíve, and clearly these concerns are not peculiar to my work—as most of us with any interest in musicology or philosophy are aware, time is a somewhat overbearing feature of both. The favored term of both departments is temporality. In philosophical discourse temporality refers to the subjective experience of time, and in musical discourse it refers to the temporal forms, structures, paradigms present in specific musics. Despite the shared word, I think that when philosophers talk about the structure of music, and when musicians talk about experience of time, it tends to be rather facile. In his book Microsound (2004), Curtis Roads identifies different levels of temporal structure: from the largest (i.e. infinite) to the smallest, which he calls the sampling rate of the universe. Roads describes musically significant divisions of time such as Macro, Meso, Sound Object and Micro. Here the Macro is the overall musical piece typically lasting from minutes to hours; the Meso is said to represent groupings of sound objects that form distinct sections within the overall composition; the Sound Object is referred to as a basic unit of musical structure (typically an individual note); finally at the Micro level are the sound “particles” that constitute the note itself. Having discussed the subject of temporality with Roads1 I get a sense that his main concerns are the hypothetical “zones of ambiguity” or boundaries between those divisions, and specifically how computer technologies enable the composer to transgress or redefine these. According to Roads, using the techniques he has developed, an individual microsonic particle can form a note or phrase or indeed be extended to form an entire score. Roads’s concern therefore is to get beyond the conceptual abstraction of music as notes and arrangements of notes, and enter a realm beyond these structural hierarchies. Yet his diagrammatic depiction of temporality—consistently shown as a kind of “frame-based” linear phenomenon, with a determinate now point and timescales extending

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into the past and imagined future—ultimately reinforces those hierarchal divisions. It is almost as if one were to divide a picture into a kind of jigsaw puzzle, complain about it, and then try to reassemble it in a different order. It more or less reasserts the familiar Western musical score albeit in rather more scientific language. Similarly it more or less reasserts popular beliefs about the structure of time as a series of regular moments (frames) that pass through the temporal window of the present. When thinking about temporality (i.e. of how time feels to us) Husserl often refers to musical structures, and for me his beliefs about music are as one-dimensional as Roads’s beliefs about time. I assume that most readers are aware of Husserl’s argument, but for those who are not, I will give a very basic account of his position. When we observe the movement of something, a bouncing ball for example, it does not appear as a series of detached positions, or as several balls one after the other in rapid succession. Instead it appears to have a continuous and unbroken momentum. Husserl suggests that in order to have an unbroken impression, one must in some way hold onto an impression of an object’s previous state and also anticipate the state that will follow. He suggests that our experience of that which is “happening” occurs because we retain a trace of what has just happened, and symmetrical to this, we calculate what is about to happen. This process is not like memory or prediction because it occurs within the phenomenological now—the temporal fringe of the present. Husserl therefore suggests that the “present” has a threefold structure which includes that which has immediately happened, and how we hold onto it, and that which is about to happen, and how we anticipate it. He calls these protention and retention. My main concern here is how, in order to illustrate his position, Husserl compares this temporal process to musical formations, arguing that the structure of temporality is like the structure of a melody. He suggests, for example, that we listen to a piece of music note by note, but in doing so we hold onto the larger musical structure, the melody, of which each note is a constitutive part.

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When a melody sounds, for example, the individual tone does not utterly disappear with the cessation of the stimulus or of the neural movement it excites. When the new tone is sounding, the preceding tone has not disappeared without a trace. If it had, we would be quite incapable of noticing the relations among the successive tones; in each moment we would have a tone, or perhaps an empty pause in the interval between the sounding of two tones, but never the representation of a melody. On the other hand, the abiding of tonerepresentation in consciousness does not settle the matter. If they were to remain unmodified, then instead of a melody we would have a chord of simultaneous tones, or rather a disharmonious tangle of sound. Husserl 1992

He goes on to explain how temporality is produced. If the stimulus disappears, the sensation also disappears. But then the sensation itself becomes productive: it produces for itself a phantasy representation the same or almost the same in content and enriched by the temporal character. This representation in turn awakens a new one, which is joined to it in a continuous fashion, and so on. Husserl 1992

This productive representation of original sensation is the basis for Husserlian time constituting consciousness. Temporality therefore emerges as a product of the interplay between retentions and protentions, and thus the temporal appearance of an object is actively constituted by the observer: what we are able to find and describe here as the phenomena of time constituting consciousness, of the consciousness in which temporal objects with their temporal determinations become constituted. Husserl 1992

I want to consider Husserl’s comparison between the two things— experience of time on the one hand, and experience of music on the other. Is it a coincidence that the particular brand of time-consciousness described by Husserl corresponds so closely to the musical paradigm that he alludes to? And, if it is not a coincidence, what then is the

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relationship between the two? I want to suggest that Husserl’s description of temporality, and his formulation of protention and retention, are actually based upon his generalized ideas about musical structures. It is important to acknowledge that Husserl is remarkably vague about the kinds of music he asks us to imagine. When he describes musical structures he talks of melodies, tones, and notes in a very general sense and never offers particular examples. In fact nowhere in The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness does he refer to a specific tradition, genre, work, score, instrument, tempo, time signature, timbre, volume envelope or pitch. One commentator even asks, “One almost begins to wonder whether Husserl ever listened to music” (Gallagher 1998). As a consequence of this ambiguity, Husserl’s discussion plays upon our shared assumptions about what music is: what constitutes a musical sound, the tempo of the piece, the relative complexity of melodic patterns, and so on. He assumes that the general structure of “melody” is of a sequence of ordered events that happen in the same order and with more or less the same dynamic emphasis each time it is played or heard. His ambiguity requires that the reader share these assumptions as if they were unquestionably the case. And in this sense Husserl asks the reader to compare the idea of melody to the idea of time. The symmetry between these two “ideas” is remarkable: Husserl’s description of temporal events and their “running off,” or the way an event “sinks into the past,” could equally apply to the note’s volume envelope (specifically the decay phase of a piano note as its energy vibrates within the body of the instrument and dissipates into the space that contains it). Similarly the diagrams he uses to illustrate his arguments could be easily mistaken for variations on a Western musical score that adhere to a linear timeline principle: “—in all these diagrams inner time is displayed as a line, a continuum of points flowing horizontally” (Larrabee 1993). Ostensibly Husserl aims to clarify his definition of the temporal by making reference to this general sense of “melody.” But one could equally suggest a very different description of what is happening in

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Husserl’s analysis: one where temporality is actually modeled on, and in response to, prior beliefs about musical structure. According to this alternative description Husserl’s “melody” could be said to promote a specific sort understanding of temporality. Imagine for example Husserl in the throws of contemplating this issue: if his prior beliefs about how a melody occupies or demarcates time were not present, then perhaps his specific analysis of temporality might have taken some other form. For me it is more than a coincidence that during his analysis of this issue, Husserl conveniently stumbles upon something (i.e. melody) that so closely shares many fundamental common features with the particular form time-experience (temporality) he wants to describe, that the two became almost identical. It is clear to me that Husserl’s beliefs about music formed part of his thinking about temporality, and that, within his argument, ideas about music and ideas about time are combined in a rather more complex manner, where one is not simply illustrative of the other. I want to suggest therefore that in Husserl’s discussion, musical structures provide a model according to which temporality is understood, constructed, interpreted, and vice versa. According to this view beliefs about music and beliefs about time are linked, and music should be considered to be a fundamental component of time-constituting consciousness. If we assume that music and time-constituting consciousness are somehow connected we should also assume that Husserl’s use of “melody” to illustrate temporality is problematic—rather like endorsing a description of space by making reference to an Italian renaissance painting (and the particular methods it uses in order to represent the three-dimensional universe within a two-dimensional canvas). In my view Husserl’s description of temporality shares some of the ideologically contended assumptions present in those methods. The correspondence between temporal “perspective” and spatial perspective is an interesting point, and one that Husserl acknowledges within his argument: [T]he process “contracts” as it sinks back into the past – a sort of temporal perspective (within the original temporal appearance) as an

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analogue of the spatial perspective. In receding into the past, the temporal object contracts and in the process also becomes obscure. Husserl 1992

Within this analog the idea of melody relates to time in much the same way that linear first-person perspective relates to space—melody represents the temporal, much like perspective represents the spatial. Similarly it sustains ideas about time in the way that linear first person perspective sustains ideas about space. For me Husserl’s analogizing of spatial and temporal perspective is interesting because the ubiquity of linear perspective in visual arts has been relentlessly critiqued by both artists and theorists throughout the last century. Such critiques question the belief that the three-dimensional space of the world can be impartially represented by the two-dimensional space of the canvas. By contrast, critical analyses of visual perspective suggest that, rather than presenting a value-free copy of the world beyond the canvas, the methods used to represent a three-dimensional world in a two dimensional plane are loaded with culturally specific notions of space, the self, and the world. Russell argues: By taking as its first premise a single point of vision, perspective had stabilized visual experience. It had bestowed order on chaos; it allowed elaborate and systematized cross-referencing, and quite soon it had become a touchstone of coherence and even-mindedness. To “lose all sense of perspective” is to this day a synonym for mental collapse. Russell 1981

Similarly Kuhn suggests that Renaissance art provides an “a priori pictorial space” that emphasizes an “extraordinarily thorough conformity to the frontal format” that “the prestige of the frontal format surely had to do instead with its aura of architectural determinacy; we are in designed space, not found space” (Kuhn 1990). And tracing the development of linear perspective, Wright (1983) describes explorations of a number of grid-based systems, dividing space into units of equal and repeatable volume, placing an emphasis therefore on the geometricizing of space.

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Linear perspective sustains the following principles: a singular viewpoint; the world as rule-governed, ordered, coherent, controlable, rational (even-mindedness); the world as goal directed in terms of designed (as opposed to found) space; and the subject as spatially fixed (conforming to frontality). In doing so it reinforces the sense of separation between ourselves and the world, and promotes the view that the self is an identifiable, stable, remote, and rational viewer of the world outside ourselves. Thus first person perspective does not merely suggest “this is where you stand as an observer in relation to this space, the objects it contains, and the events depicted,” it actively demonstrates this position with the participation of the viewer. To sum up, the values embedded within the structural logic of this system construct the Classical/Cartesian-like subject (the subject as fixed and remote, rational viewer of the world, engaging with it in a goaldriven manner, central and singular). These kinds of arguments propose that linear perspective is a valueladen system that constructs a very particular depiction of space that is bound into a particular world-view. It necessarily also constructs a spatially identifiable position outside the canvas from which the viewer encounters the contents of the painting. Linear perspective therefore not only shapes our understanding of the space shown, but also our wider experience and understanding of ourselves as distinct points in relation to the extending space around us—a subjectivity that Sloterdijk (1998) characterizes as “remaining planted on its extensionless thoughtpoint while observing an extended thing.” In critiquing this, Metzinger refers to the “self-model,” the Classical subject with which we are so familiar with is just another (albeit rather popular) self-model—a way of understanding ourselves, the world, and our place within it. Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognised as models. . . . you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated . . . Consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective are fascinating representational phenomena that have a long evolutionary history, a history which eventually led to the

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formation of complex societies and a cultural embedding of conscious experience itself. Metzinger 2003

If spatial perspective is both “in and of” a particular world-view, how might the melodic structures to which Husserl refers function within the same world-view? The musics to which Husserl alludes (recall he never actually describes specific notes or sounds) presumably include the ordering of distinct notes over a given time frame—these are planned in advance and stepped through one event at a time, perhaps played in response to a written score or some sort of internalized pattern. In this sense Husserl’s melody is ordered in a temporal domain in much the same way that spatial objects are ordered in a spatial domain according to the techniques used in linear perspective. Here musical events emanate from the future (everything to the right-hand side of the now-note as written on a score); through the present (the note that is actually happening); and into the past (everything to the left-hand side of the now-note). Clearly this ordering is already associated with a conception of time as a linear, one-dimensional, onedirection “flow” of moments between past and future. It promotes the view that time is something that passes as opposed to temporality as being something stationary or wholly present. Within this particular framework emphasis is placed on an infinitely narrow, but overwhelmingly important, “now” point—the point where one is currently “located” within the overall musical or temporal landscape as it unfolds. The listener as a distinct entity is “here” within the “now.” Thus this framework constitutes the listener in a particular relation to the narrative sequence of events, placing the listener in an identifiable and stable moment (recall Sloterdijks’ “extensionless thought-point”) within a temporal “flow.” This establishes a temporally fixed “first-person-perspective” in relation to an ordered, coherent, planned, and typically predictable temporal landscape. In doing so it presents an inherently teleological framework that, much like the spatial form of linear perspective, simultaneously demonstrates the authority and authenticity of the Classical subject. Just as perspective is a description of space, the relation of spatially ordered objects within it, and our position as observer; so too Husserl’s

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conception of melody offers a particular and culturally specific description of time-consciousness, the world and the self. This depiction of time is similar (as Husserl suggests) to linear spatial perspective— linear temporality that extends outwards in two directions (the past and the future) from the subject’s now point. I think therefore that Husserl’s mistake is to compare temporality to a system that in itself already serves as a framework within which our experience and understanding of temporality is constructed. He asks us to think about time by comparing time to something that is already a way of thinking about time. And thus arrives at a description of time that simply reasserts his particular package of European beliefs: members of a society share a common temporal consciousness; time is a social category of thought, a product of society . . . Collective-time is the sum of the temporal procedures which interlock to form the cultural rhythm of a given society. Hassard 1990

For me this raises questions about the validity of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction as a way of encountering the world with “no knowledge or preconceptions in hand” (Cogan n.d.). It is rather coincidental that after a process of phenomenological reduction Husserl comes to more or less the same assumptions about time that all we nonphilosophers already generally adhere to in our day to day lives. Husserl merely reasserts his European prejudices in the guise of some a-cultural, transhistorical truth. For persons of European descent, space and time are our space and our time, that is concepts developed in “western” thought. But we are apt to assume that they are essential features of the cosmos rather than categories of thought which enable us to interpret the world as a system in accord with our experiences and purposes. Elkin 1969

It is at this point that I find some similarities between Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and rhetorics surrounding the practice of deep listening—a technique pioneered by Pauline Oliveros to advance

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sonic awareness. I think deep listening is often a very positive and rewarding experience, but for me the idea that one can somehow transcend one’s culture and personality in order to experience the world in a “deeper” manner is problematic—we cannot unlearn our cognitive development. I raised this issue when I met Oliveros with a class of students, and in place of deep listening I proposed the idea “method listening,” a term derived from the practice of method acting. The term is intended to foreground how we often engage in role-play and adopt different personae in order to participate in different types of music activities. Although I can claim to have conceived the term, I do not claim to have invented the process—I think that it is something each of us does every time we listen to any piece of music. In accordance with method listening, music is not about getting in touch with some deeper feeling or self, but merely a means to facilitate role playing of one sort or another. I think this is as true when we listen to Miles Davis’s Birth of Cool, Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols, Four Seasons (Vivaldi), LaMonte Young’s Trio For Strings or Cage’s Imaginary Landscape: if you want to “get into it” you are compelled to wear the stupid outfit that comes with it. For me music is generally about wearing a stupid costume, and the enjoyment of music is actually the enjoyment of wearing that costume—of continually reperforming one’s aesthetic prejudices as an attempt to convincingly achieve some semblance of what might constitute a “convincing” personality . . . “you could wear no better masks, you present-day men, than your own faces!” (Nietzsche 1891). Imagine for example someone really enjoying listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and involuntarily growing a massive white wig (of the kind worn by Italian Baroque composers). I suspect this is what is actually what happens at some purported psychodynamic level— recalling both Metzinger’s self-model hypothesis as well as the Nietzschean mask-as-face metaphor. For me the interdependence between music and “the self ” takes two distinct forms: (1) in terms of the correlation between the description of music as a linear stream of events and the self as a stable position within those events (mirroring the interdependence of the Cartesian/

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Classical subject and first-person representations of space, i.e. music as a first-person representation of time); and (2) as a means performing a self-identity (as opposed to an expression of who one “really is”). To continue the costume metaphor of the previous paragraph these two distinct “forms” function as both coat hanger (1) and garment (2) and share that sort of relationship. A model that is very different to the kind of “system and its uses” dichotomy, or, the container and its contents scheme. What I mean is this model hopefully enables us to avoid questions like: what is the general structure of the self and who specifically am I? Retuning to the issue of time-experience and its relation to musical time, as most contemporary musicians now accept, musical structures are not universally built of notes that are played in a predetermined manner and in a particular order. Even if we might agree that any music could be transcribed in this kind of linear fashion, it does not necessarily follow that the music is constructed, encoded, learned or inherited within a linear score-like paradigm. In fact many forms of vernacular and non-Western musics are based around dynamic systems rather than linear scores. And the whole body emphasis of many vernacular forms is not ideally encoded with the linear temporal diagram that is the Western score. Similarly unusual rule-based procedures, indeterminacy, and so on have been to some extent investigated and annexed by musical orthodoxies during the twentieth century. Ligeti’s Continuum (1968) for example presents a series of notes the speed of which hovers on the border of both the performers ability to play and the audience’s ability to distinguish. These challenge Husserlian assumptions about music—but do they constitute different temporal modes, different experiences of temporality? For Heidegger the temporal is not a reducible thing that exists independently of our experiences of it. Throughout his major work (Heidegger 1962) and in a colossal amount of supplementary writings, Heidegger promotes the view that the temporal shows up in various different forms throughout our encounters with the world and the objects within it. “Time is not something that happens outside of us, a

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kind of receptacle of being; we ourselves are time. The processes of the world are encountered in time” (Heidegger 2002). For me, as an artist working mainly with time-constitutive systems, this is the primary significance of Heideggerian philosophy. Drawing from this position I want to argue that different musics—forms, styles, traditions, sounds, and so on—construct distinct temporal modalities, that are themselves part of wider cultural beliefs about time and its structure. The temporal structure of Indian music is a living demonstration of how profoundly a musical tradition can reflect the influence of cultural institutions of time. Just as the visuals arts of India have been shaped by long-standing cultural preferences for a circular disposition of space, so have music and the other performing arts responded to preferences for a cyclical disposition of time. Macey 1994 Other peoples with different cultural heritages, with different experiences and purposes, may conceive of space and time differently from ourselves. They do, as can be illustrated from, amongst others, the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines. Elkin 1969

A principal point of agreement in much writing on Australian Aboriginal culture is the suggestion that Aboriginal cosmogony places a priority on space instead of time. Swain (1993) contends that Aboriginal ontology is one where being is understood primarily in terms of “place and space” as opposed to time. Rather than prejudicing the issue with the word “time,” I suggest it is best to state that the Aborigines operate from an understanding of rhythmed events. The semantic clarity is important in order to avoid giving time an unfounded ontological autonomy in Aboriginal life. In the popular Western view, time still, so to speak, ticks on even if nothing occurs; its emancipation from events is ensured by its own subjugation of an ongoing numbered measure. But in Aboriginal thought there is nothing beyond events themselves. This is entirely

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apparent in their cosmologies, which lack any reference to ultimate pre-event origins. For Aborigines, there is nothing more fundamental than the statement: events occur. Swain 1993 There is no first cause, original world-stuff, moment of origin or co-ordinated emergence. Rather than a world creation, Aboriginal narratives affirm a multitude of independent place-shaping Events. . . . Aboriginal ontology rests upon the maxim that a place-being emerged, moved and established an abode . . . the Aboriginal spatial order has in fact left no room for the emergence of temporality as a principle of being. Rather [it] must derive from the ‘affirmation of place’. Swain 1993

This assertion is validated by clinical studies, Davidson and Klich (1980) report “a preference for spatial over temporal order in free-recall tasks” of Aboriginal “desert” children aged between 9 and 16 years. Similarly, TenHouten (1999) suggests that Australian Aboriginal thinking patterns do not feature “linear” information processing, and suggests “visuospatial” rather than “temporal” orientation. Drawing from this, TenHouten develops a distinction between two forms of time consciousness, defined as Patterned-cyclical and Ordinary-Linear. Pattern-cyclical time consciousness is associated with Aboriginal culture, and Ordinary-Linear consciousness is typically associated with a Western worldview. A particularly notable feature of TenHouten’s model is a difference in how time is experienced. In Ordinary-Linear Time-Consciousness time shows up as a series of fleeting moments, where time-passes. By contrast, in a Pattern-Cyclical Time-Consciousness mode it shows up as the experience of long duration. Elkin (1969) suggests the Aboriginal concept of The Dreaming is central to this extended temporality, it is simultaneously “here and now” providing the “grounding or conditions of existence.” Here temporarily is not conceived of as a horizontal line that extends back chronologically through a series of pasts, but rather of a vertical line that underlies and is contained within the present’s

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Table 1 TenHouten’s conceptual models of Ordinary-Linear and Patternedcyclical forms of time-consciousness (TenHouten 1999) Ordinary-Linear Time

Patterned-Cyclical Time

linear, time as a single dimension

dualistic, split into two levels of reality fusion of past, present, and future

separation of past, present, and future regularity, continuity, and homogeneity clock orientation and calendar orientation diachronic ordering of events: priority, simultaneity, posteriority quantitative: numerical measurements; an invariant anchor or a zero point the experience of time as a series of fleeting moments

irregularity, discontinuity, and heterogeneity event orientation and nature-based orientation synchronic ordering of events; cyclical, patterned, oscillatory qualitative: nonnumerical measurements; now the anchor point the experience of long duration

eternal now. Elkin’s description of an eternal now corresponds to TenHouten’s description of pattern-cyclical temporality as extended duration. The persistence of these extended temporal forms is in stark contrast to the ephemeral and momentary frame of Western time. Thus we have two very distinct versions of the phenomenological now: (1) that which is infinitely contracted into an impossible point of zero duration, slicing into time with infinitely sharp precision; and (2) that which is boundlessly expanded thus rendering all time both indivisible and immeasurable, neither containing nor contained within a grid-like temporal meta-structure. In terms of how these temporal structures are present in musical form we can see that, in an albeit rather simplistic sense, the notion of an eternal now is clearly embodied in the extended sonic forms of didgeridoo music and its circular breathing techniques. Rose (2000) suggests that temporality, being present within a boundless now, in this context literally “pours through the person.” Although the form of this specific sound is subject to

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temporal modulation, its continuous and extended envelope and extreme duration share features associated with pattern-cyclical time-consciousness. Given that this specific musical practice takes the form of singular extended tone, it does not easily fit into the Husserlian melody diagram of music where individual notes form a larger whole. To my Western ears the timings present in Australian Aboriginal rhythmic structures appear rather extemporaneous. These events do not follow a strict temporal meta-grid of equally spaced events of mathematically related duration, nor are they placed along side the hypothetical clock of Western temporality that “ticks on even if nothing occurs” (Swain 1993). The flow and variability of these musical structures seems to imply what Swain has called the fundamental statement that “events occur.” Here percussive events do not march toward the observer in a sort of military style from the future and into the past; they do not announce their arrival like the considered, meticulous or grandiose musical structures of the Western tradition— they simply occur. Similarly Rose (2000) attempts to show how the Aboriginal priority of place over time, and the notion of an infinite now are encoded within Aboriginal dance and music. In the context of what she describes as a move from geometric time to embodied and geographic time she writes: The poetics of time, its patterns, waves, and interlocking rhythms work with the politics of correct performances, to transform cosmogonic potential into living action. [. . .] Time, rather than being rendered static or absent, becomes experientially and overwhelmingly focussed, present and shared. The person flips from being an actor in time to becoming a heartbeat of time. Rose 2000

This brief description of Aboriginal cosmogony and culture aims to demonstrate the non-universality of (a) the musical framework alluded to by Husserl, and (b) the character of temporality that he has aligned with it. But even if we only take Husserl’s account of melody as “overlappingevents” as a description of Western classical musics it remains blatantly clear that the Husserlian music diagram is a gross oversimplification.

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Clarke (2011) for instance points out that Husserl’s description of music assumes that one event stops before the other starts, whereas this is not universally true of musical structures. He also demonstrates how musical phrases are not only bonded in terms of “temporal congruity,” but also through “similarity and equivalence” which suggest, according to Clarke, that in musical terms retention and recollection interact in a process that “radically expands the temporal depth of field.” This re-presentation is “imbued with the cumulative, ongoing presence of all the elapsed piece behind it.” I agree with Clarke’s suggestion that Husserl’s analysis of musical temporality is rather one-dimensional as it ignores the complex multidimensional interplay of repetitive structures at play in Western musics. Although Clarke is effective in showing how Husserl’s references to music miss out the multi-layering of temporality fundamental to the organization of Western musics, we should not forget that Husserl’s main concern is not with a description of temporality in music, but of temporality as it appears to us. In this sense Clarke’s analysis does not necessarily unpick Husserl’s position, but it does reveal his fundamental prejudices; it shows how his descriptions of both time-experience and time structures in music are equally grounded in a Western metaphysical tradition. To some of us this interest in non-linear musical temporality might seem overtly familiar. La Monte Young for example, in reference to the prolonged sustained tones present in his works, states: we determined at a certain point that our medium was time . . . I think that this kind of sense of time has to do with getting away from the earthly sense of direction which goes from birth to death, in other words, like developmental form, and has to do with static form. Nagoski, n.d.

Kramer identifies an absence of linear process in music which he calls “Vertical time” (1988) and suggests that the listener: “give up expectation and enter the vertical time of the work—where linear expectation, implication, cause, effect, antecedents, and consequents do not exist” (Kramer 1988). Referring to Meyer’s term “nonteleological music” (2010), Kramer compares encounters with such temporality

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to “looking at a piece of sculpture.” Here music does not move purposefully towards a predetermined resolution, it is not a narrative that takes the listener along some emotionally planned journey. Kramer’s looking-at time as a mode of encountering musical temporality can perhaps be likened to Tudor’s (1972) comment on Cage’s Music of Changes—that it seemed more like watching time as opposed to feeling it. Generally speaking, however, I am not a fan of these works or the rhetoric that surrounds their consumption. My primary objection to this work is not its sonic or aesthetic character, but how that character promotes specific responses in audiences. I feel this plays upon a whole host of cultural assumptions and prejudices (for example the objectification, simplification, and commodification of Eastern culture and religious belief, for a largely white, middle class, Western audience) while simultaneously promoting itself as somehow cathartic, therapeutic, and liberating. My critique of Husserl’s analysis of temporality aims to show that both the object and how we encounter it are culturally determined: there is no such thing as phenomenological reduction that is free of “prior knowledge or preconception” (Cogan n.d.). Similarly, the idea that when we listen to a piece of music we somehow conveniently forget whatever cultural baggage we dragged with us into the room is not a view that I would readily accept. For example I do not hear Aboriginal Australian musics the way an Aboriginal Australian might. For me the reported escape from the regularity and linearity of Western temporal meta-grid clearly only serves to reassert an implied acceptance of its omnipresence. Comments like “time stood still” or “time slowed down” merely highlight the fact that anomalous temporal experiences of this sort are understood and interpreted within a resolutely linear-timeline paradigm of the sort formalized by TenHouten. If someone reports that time slowed down, it necessarily means that they assume that time “moves” at a certain regular speed; similarly if time is said to have stopped, it also necessarily means that it is thought of as a thing that fundamentally passes. We do not typically hear these kinds of accounts of weird temporal distortions from Australian Aboriginal communities

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themselves. In each case the temporal anomaly is compared to a temporal norm and thus the anomalous experience is thought of as a pathological exception akin to, but unfortunately never as extreme as, drug or near death experiences. So for me the production and consumption of these supposed a-temporal musical structures, although often extremely pleasurable, should perhaps be seen as an example of the role play I described earlier—perhaps a way of partially ignoring one’s cultural and cognitive hereditaments but certainly not overcoming them. Finally I want to discuss how Husserl’s beliefs about temporality and music also crop up in the now ubiquitous time-line-based music composition and editing softwares that dominate most recording studios, mastering suites, and home studio setups. These have typically become the nucleic component around which everything else is connected. It is astounding to think how closely the time-line model, derived from the Western score, resembles the linear time paradigm described by TenHouten. It is also interesting how this method is considered to be a standard within which any arrangement of notes and sounds is possible. But such accolades miss the finer yet fundamental point that time-line environments structure our thinking and our practices around a linear time paradigm. We are forced to stop, pause, rewind, think ahead—basically adopt the role of a remote pseudo-Cartesian outside-the-temporal-landscape subject in order to manipulate our musical materials. Musical composition thus becomes a determinate act of planning, foresight, narrative development, and so on; each change becomes labored over, each development clearly considered by an intentional agent that is separate from the temporal domain within which the development takes place. The process of composition in this environment becomes an act of remote control of materials. It is interesting that Logic, perhaps the most prominent software of its kind, began life as Notator, a system that initially structured music in terms of the organization and re-use of a bank of patterns. As Notator evolved, this pattern-based feature was dropped in favor of a spatially organized linear temporal environment within which events could be given an order and viewed as a whole from a vantage point

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beyond the temporal domain of the work. I assume this decision was made because it more accurately reflected the assumption that this was what music was really like—organized sound. The timeline’s governing principle is to organize, to constitute the musician as mere organizer of sound. For me this characteristic has always presented creative difficulties, as well as ideological problems. But in recent years other paradigms have become more popular. Cycling 74’s Max uses a flowchart-like interface to construct different procedural, compositional, and performance-based systems. The visual-spatial programing metaphor offered by these softwares closely resemble the features of pattern-cyclical time-consciousness. Table 2, derived from TenHouten’s “Conceptual Models of Ordinary-Linear and Patterned-Cyclical Forms of Time-Consciousness,” is intended to illustrate this correspondence. The table shows how the timeline method found in much music composition software is both derived from and sustains the features present in “Ordinary-Linear Time Consciousness.” Here time is divided into past, present, and future; time flows at a constant rate, in one direction; it has a determinate now point—the first person division

Table 2 Comparison between modes of time consciousness and music softwares (TenHouten 1999) Timeline

Visual Programming Environment

linear time as single dimension separation of past, present, and future regularity, continuity clock orientation diachronic ordering of events: priority, simultaneity, posteriority metrical measurement, time divided into equal and related segments an invariant anchor or zero point time as a series of ordered moments

space as two dimensional past, present, and future not represented irregularity, discontinuity event orientation synchronic ordering of events: cyclical, patterned, oscillatory variable measurement

now as the anchor point the infinite now, events just occur

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between the past and the future; events are predetermined, regular, and repeatable; time is divided into equal and related parts. The visual programming environment, by contrast, has a spatial character; time (and its division into past, present, and future) is not a necessary feature of this environment, here events “merely occur” (Swain 1993). The division of time into regular and related temporal units is rejected in favor of divisions of indeterminate duration—variable measurement. Although this feature is possible within timeline environments, such environments are certainly not conducive to works exploring this characteristic. Unlike time-line-based approaches the visual programming environment does not have an absolute start point; neither does it construct a temporal landscape divided into a series of moments moving between past and future; instead it foregrounds what is happening now. In this sense the music composer, producer, or performer becomes something other than a mere remote, disembodied, outside-time, organizer of sound.

Note 1 In 2011 I took part in a discussion group chaired by Tony Myatt at Supersimetria—“New Languages in Computer Music,” Barcelona. This included myself, Curtis Roads, and Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. Since then I corresponded with Roads during the developing of “Composing with Process,” a radio series commission by Radio Web MACBA for an episode addressing treatments of time in generative musics.

Works cited Clarke, D. (2011), “Music, Phenomenology, Time Consciousness: Meditations after Husserl,” in D. Clarke and E. Clarke (eds), Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Cogan, J. (n.d.), Phenomenological Reduction. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://www.iep.utm.edu/phen-red/ (accessed May 18, 2015). Davidson, G. R. and L. Z. Klich (1980), Cultural Factors in the Development of Temporal and Spatial Ordering. Child Development 51(2): 569. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1129294 (accessed October 2, 2015). Elkin, A. P. (1969), Elements of Australian Aboriginal Philosophy. Oceania x(2): 85–98. Gallagher, S. (1998), The Inordinance of Time. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Hassard, J. (1990), The Sociology of Time. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Limited. Heidegger, M. (1962), Being and Time. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, M. (2002), Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Husserl, E. (1992), On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kramer, J. D. (1988), The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel Verlag GmbH. Kuhn, J. R. (1990), Measured Appearances: Documentation and Design in Early Perspective Drawing. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53: 114–32. Larrabee, M. J. (1993), Inside Time-consciousness: Diagramming the Flux. Husserl Studies 10(3): 181–210. Available online: http://link.springer.com/ article/10.1007/BF 01386689 (accessed October 2, 2015). Macey, S. (1994), Encyclopaedia of Time. London: Taylor & Francis. Metzinger, T. (2003), BEING NO ONE, The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Meyer, L. B. (2010), Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nagoski, I. (n.d.), La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela: An Interview by Ian Nagoski. Available online: http://www.halana.com/lymz.html (accessed September 4, 2013). Nietzsche, F. (1891), Thus Spake Zarathustra: A book for All and None. Roads, C. (2004), Microsound. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.

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Rose, D. B. (2000), To Dance with Time: A Victoria River Aboriginal Study. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 11(2): 287–96. Available online: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1835-9310.2000.tb00044.x/ abstract (accessed October 2, 2015). Russell, J. (1981), The Meanings of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Sloterdijk, P. (2011), Spheres Volume 1: Bubbles Microspherology. Los Angeles: Semitext(e). Swain, T. (1993), A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. TenHouten, W. D. (1997), Primordial Temporality, the Self, and the Brain. Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 20(3): 253–79. Available online: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10617361/20 (accessed October 2, 2015). TenHouten, W. D. (1999), Text and Temporality: Patterned-Cyclical and Ordinary-Linear Forms of Time-Consciousness, Inferred from a Corpus of Australian Aboriginal and Euro-Australian Life-Historical Interviews. Symbolic Interaction 22(2), 121–37. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/10.1525/si.1999.22.2.121 (accessed October 2, 2015). Tudor, D. (1972), From Piano to Electronics. Music and Musicians. 2024–6. Wright, L. (1983), Perspective in Perspective. London: Routledge.

11

How to Think Sonically? On the Generativity of the Flesh Holger Schulze

As I am writing and rereading this chapter, it is rather early on a hot summer’s morning and I mostly hear heavy traffic outside my window; I am still waking up, a hot cup of tea with sugar and milk at my side. It seems that I selectively try to exclude these rather unwanted noises right now, this mixture of accelerating cars and a steadily humming hard drive—but they are present all the same. Composed and intentionally designed sound is shaping this moment together with a whole lot of unwanted noise, forming a whole of almost indiscernible sounds. Before you started reading this chapter you might have browsed over some of the other contributions to this volume. Doing that, you might have fantasized about this sound or that noise: from the nineteenth century, from ancient cultures, or archeologically and forensically reconstructed and imagined soundscapes. While doing so, you might have been enveloped in a drone of sounds from your hard drive, from the outside traffic, your mobile phone, and from the upstairs neighbors. These sounds constitute the wild and erratic population of everyday listening, which have not been domesticated, neither aesthetically nor discursively—and not at all technically—until recently. Your and my listening experience consist of largely contradictory, mingled and highly dynamic sound events, sonic drones, and threads of listening. Might contingency and mingledness be some of the foremost qualities of this erratic population you call sound? There are many ways of making kinds of men and women. In each way of making kinds of them there is a different system of finding them 217

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resembling. Sometime there will be here every way there can be of seeing kinds of men and women. Sometime there will be then a complete history of each one. Everyone always is repeating the whole of them and so sometime someone who sees them will have a complete history of everyone. Sometime someone will know all the ways there are for people to be resembling, someone sometime then will have a completed history of everyone. Stein 1966: 290

I hear Gertrude Stein’s voice right now. And you will encounter her voice again later in this chapter. The mingledness of my individual listening experience right now throws me inmidst of the paradoxes of sonic research: research on sound is often motivated by the noble if not paradoxical ambition to think with, through and beyond sounds all at once. In the twentieth century various artists and composers, instrumentalists and architects, engineers and mathematicians did extensive research on sound: starting with R. Murray Schafer’s bold ambition to archive and analyze the soundscapes of the world (Schafer 1977); passing a number of more elitist approaches to sound from the realm of composition and sound art (Born 1995); arriving at a series of more traditional academic approaches to understanding sounds by means of culturally reflected and historically informed inquiries based on field research and critical analysis (Bull and Back 2003; Sterne 2003, Bijsterveld 2008; Schulze 2008; Erlmann 2010, Bijsterveld and Pinch 2011; Sterne 2012). In the early twenty-first century, the authors of this volume (and probably many of its readers) live in a world where a lot of audio (a rather barbarian reduction implying total inclusion) is being transmitted, researched on, and post-produced in almost every single second in a wide variety of cultures all around the planet: new mixtures of analog and digital media, of ancient and cutting edge forms of performance—new technologies, new gadgets, new products, and software applications are being developed. In this maelstrom of auditory extravaganza or sonic ennui (as some prefer to call it), one question seems to remain unanswered. It is a question that concerns the very foundations and the reflexivity of research in sound: How is sonic research in the strictest sense possible? Could

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it be necessary to approach the often separated areas of sonic research— for instance the auditory in everyday life, in design, in the arts, in perception—as one cohesive research field? How can it be possible that an entity like sound, resulting out of physical movements, processes, and actions—often initiated by creatures one could call anthropoid or humanoid—is investigated by an individual research practice like listening? Could it be appropriate to think any material sounding and any researcher listening as one cohesive aggregation, a sonic corpus? Sirens and ringtones inhabit this edifice. The effects of actual sonic vibrancy can be scary, disturbing, even humiliating and disorienting from time to time. But were it not precisely such experiences which guided many researchers into this whole new, unsettling field of research in the first place? Is a large truck driving down the road? Or is it the neighbors’ kids who are jumping up and down? Can you do research on sounds while immersed in exactly these sounds? How could it thus be possible to do research on sounds that leaves more traditional logocentric approaches of academia behind—and indeed proceeds by thinking and researching sonically and not verbally, visually, diagrammatically? Would that not qualify as a trembling resonance in research—disturbing and shattering research practices, scientific entities, academic dispositives? Could you imagine a post-logocentric aesthetic lest a post-logocentric theory of the auditory? Or in other words: How could one imagine thinking sonically? Thinking with, through and beyond sounds? Firstly, and as an outline of the remainder of the chapter, thinking sonically could be narrowed down to a process, which is: (a) not reducible to mere alphanumeric, logocentric translations or Aufschreibesysteme (Kittler 1985). Physically inscribed and visually represented numbers, letters, words or mathematical operations are literally not what one listens to. As a consequence, sonic thinking implies a genuine sonic approach, which is (b) not ignorant of how specific and highly dynamic spatial environments shape and condition one’s experience. Sound is

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always experienced in particular situations, and not in abstract graphs, flowcharts or statistical distributions. This sonic way of thinking, moreover, should (c) not ignore the fundamentally corporeal character of auditory experiences for anthropoids (as the factual main listeners in research), because their bodies are in fact their primary and very material receivers, amplifiers and interpreters of sound. Finally, sonic thinking should (d) not be ignorant of the imagination and its sensorial and proprioceptive aspects—as sound resonates with the entire anthropoid’s body, whose various senses are not too easily separated from one another. These four implications for sonic thinking will guide my investigation. “Everyone always is repeating the whole of them and so sometime someone who sees them will have a complete history of everyone. Sometime someone will know all the ways there are for people to be resembling, someone sometime then will have a completed history of everyone” (Stein 1966: 290). Following this, the present chapter is sort of a memento audio: What could be the crucial methodologies concerning central epistemological and ontological questions within sound studies?

How to think spatially? To think sonically is not isolated from other epistemological changes and challenges in current theoretical discourse. It is part of a broader effort, which has been going on now for almost two decades, mainly related to developments in research on performativity, on emotion, and on the cultural history of sciences and humanities. Examining sonic thinking hence leads to an issue recurrently addressed in recent efforts of cultural research: How to think spatially? How can a researcher find a

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way to articulate and to discuss sound and reflection as genuinely defined by, generated in, and emanating from specific spatial constellations of materials? Sound events are spatial by definition. But reflections on sound events avoid to easily their particular spatial and non-spatial implications. At present, there is a specific group of sounds which oscillate between and are propagated through these buildings in ways that makes them hard to localize. They seem to almost flood the spaces and chambers, as they are permanently present in every single instant. One might therefore quite easily forget them. Nevertheless, they might produce a general tension or even an unease, which both permeates and perforates one’s body—I do not feel well in this room as soon as you turn on the video projector. The windows seem to be stiflingly closed. It feels like a coffin in here. The static humming and high-frequency buzzing of the loudspeakers and the screens around us engulfs me and almost chokes me. As a researcher one has to accept that all of her or his thinking and reflection is situated per se: it is spatial and located—as it is individual and personal (even if skillfully camouflaged). There is no such thing as a consistently abstract and non-situated thinking, unrelated to the person inhabited by thought, though Western philosophy (as well as a number of administrative logics) might have wanted us to believe otherwise and still does so from time to time in various publication formats and situations of public discourse. In fact, to recognize this as a mere camouflage of a postulated non-situativity in academia is a major leap. To actually accept the inherent performative reality of research might provide—if applied with a sensible subtlety—a way more complex and critically reflected road to understanding sound cultures and historiographies of listening. The sociology of spaces or Raumsoziologie of Martina Löw (2001) might be a first step into this new realm of situated research on sound. Löw explores how humanoids are, on the one hand, phenomenologically situated, and on the other, how they construct and situate the spaces in which they find themselves. As anthropoid one generates this physical

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order via two operations, the first of which Löw calls spacing, describing the mental apprehension of the distribution of locations of different objects, beings, and processes. The other operation she terms Syntheseleistung or achievement of synthesis, meaning the formation of a coherent impression of a situation, which one might call a space (Löw 2001: 158f). More specifically, in 2007 Barry Blesser (the inventor and programmer of the first digital reverberation algorithm) published the outlines of an approach to an aural architecture (Blesser and Salter 2007), which does not primarily operate in the visual or sculptural domains—but proceeds via the auditory. Even for the architectural practices of the 2010s, this is still a bold claim, seeing that architecture still relies heavily on the cultural techniques of drawing, physical scale modeling, 2D-blueprints and rather static 3D-rendering. In his volume, Blesser succeeds in finding a specific language to describe how human beings experience architectural settings aurally, without re-invoking well-known terminology or the schematics of building acoustics and room acoustics. Among other things Blesser proposes that one reflects on the acoustic horizon (Blesser and Salter 2007: 20–34) in which one hears (a limit of the audible, which is not represented by visual walls or other optical or physical hindrances). He also proposes a way to analyze how an edifice can be aurally illuminated by sounds (Blesser and Salter 2007: 12–19). A building, he argues, does not sound by itself but needs to be activated via sound. Though such terminology might still be regarded as being full of visual metaphors, it nevertheless changes the concept of space by directing one’s attention towards a sonic form of propagation and a genuinely aural way of perceiving the propagations of sound. Aural architecture as a set of terms and descriptions allows for a spatial analysis of experiencing sound. Finally, I would like to introduce a term here that the German media researcher, musicologist and trained jazz musician Rolf Großmann coined in 2008. His concept of the auditory dispositive [auditives Dispositiv] is capable of radically directing one’s perspective toward a spatial analysis of sound. It becomes an approach that takes the very material and physical nature of auditory effects and processes into

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account. At this very moment of reading for instance, you could be part of the auditory dispositive of a library or an office space. Both locations and spaces have their very own regulations, their historical predecessors and their ethical and moral codes which pile up to a whole anthropological concept of what human beings should be doing in such spaces. Take the situation of the library: as an auditory dispositive, this spatial arrangement is related to the history of designing and building places for, e.g., philological research, for detailed close reading and an intensely, if not intimately, executed analysis of texts and documents. The architecture of shelves and tables, lamps and chairs, of draperies and aisles are all spatial arrangements that provide essential elements to what constitutes library proper. All its material, its geometrical and its ornamental appearances thus provide a specific aural architecture that frames, distorts, and focuses your and my listening and reading activity. The silence postulated in buildings for storing books and analyzing texts, is thus of a very specific, historical quality. This auditory dispositive implies and demands the bodily tension of a concentrated reader from its visitors and users—a reader who might easily be irritated or distracted. At the same time it also implies that a state of non-silence, of noise and babble, would be distractive to any reader and that distraction would result in an inadequate form of concentration for textual analysis and proper academic work. The silence of the library—having its origins in the history of work and prayer rituals in monasteries—is thus a moralizing silence, a silence that almost automatically implies worshipping of the individual text and of the whole archive of stored texts. Reading in the library is probably the most prominent reverential (if not religious) activity in Western writing culture (besides writing itself, of course). Consequently, whenever one is in a library, one tries to discipline bodily movements and minds to grasp the meaning of the words one is reading. I try avoid making noises, moving my body, whistling, or finger snapping in order not to distort the activity of reading. Even a—presumably all-silent—activity like reading has its highly spatial and material sound practice connected to it, which, in this case, is mainly a practice of non-sound.

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The approaches by Großmann, Blesser, or Löw all stress that a sound event and a listening experience take place in specific spaces and situations. Moreover, any sound event can only be materially manifest in a specific physical situation—be it a concert venue, an art gallery, a tablet computer with poor loudspeakers, or a pair of headphones. The materiality of the situation in which a specific noise propagates is crucial. One cannot speak substantially about a listening experience without also describing and analyzing the specific material and physical situation, including (but not limited to) the architecture, technologies, and designs in which the experience takes place. In thinking spatially and sonically, one then focuses on: The Auditory Dispositive and the Aural Architecture as the historically, culturally, and materially determined, and thus highly situated and immersive, conditions of any sonic experience.

How to think corporeally? Within this material framework and the immersive and situated positions it offers, one can hardly avoid speaking of a genuinely corporeal quality of listening. It is the individual anthropoid’s flesh—a brute physical and material existence in a certain space, in a particular place and with a specific corporeal condition—that is the actual means of access to a spatial thinking. Following the argument on spatiality, the second methodological challenge becomes the question of how to think corporeally? How can a reflection on sound manage not only to articulate and discuss theoretical propositions on the nature of sound, but also reflect the highly individual and idiosyncratic bodily aspects of sounding and listening? Imagine this situation: You are in a room, talking with some friends and colleagues. Suddenly one of your colleagues silently points at the ceiling. You may be surprised that she or he would do such a thing, but you follow the direction of the index finger and realize that it is pointing

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to the video projector hanging from the ceiling, still projecting an image onto the wall, at which no-one looks anymore. Though you heard it all along, you now realize that the video projector’s cooling fan has been getting continuously louder for a minute or so. Actually listening to this noise now, you also become aware why it seemed as if the words of the person pointing at the projector barely left his or her mouth. She barely heard the words herself—let alone the possibility of you understanding what was said. The aural architecture of this space was darkened; it was grayed out by this continuous humming noise. Only now you realize how uncomfortable you perceived this space for the past moments. The rather banal growing noise from the projector had a certain influence on your (and other’s) self-perception and on your kinesthetic and proprioceptive bodily felt sense (Gendlin 1992). The fundamental question implied here is: how does one perform her or his auditory bodily sensorium via specific techniques du corps (Mauss 1934)? To explore this question, one might turn to Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on the status of the humanoid body in contemporary culture, developed in Corpus (Nancy 1992, translation: 2008). Here, Nancy argues that the Western concept of the body as a signifying structure—deeply rooted in Christian religion, in Western writing culture, and in cultural and technological practices—is currently undergoing a major transformation (Nancy 1992: 7–11). Among the major causes of this transformation are global developments that confront us with non-Western concepts of the body, with the experience of expanding mass societies and with a vast amount of non-traditional cultures worldwide. This newly discovered sensorial subtlety of the body, or Leib (Schmitz 1990, Waldenfels 2000), is reflected in the term tension that Nancy introduces in characterizing this corpus. By this term he differentiates the dead corpse of Western anatomical analysis from the living, interacting and interpenetrating bodies in cultures traditionally not adhering to a hristianized writing culture. Nancy writes: When the body is no longer alive, has no more tonus, it either passes into rigor mortis (cadaverous rigidity), or into the inconsistency of

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rotting. Being a body is being a certain tone, a certain tension. I’d also even say that a tension is also a tending. Nancy 2008: 1341

Tension and tonus, tone is his definition of a living body. Stressing this individual tension leads him in other writings to reflect on how listening—as a cultural practise in general and as a specific form of habitus—shapes individual thinking today, on the fringe: To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin. Nancy 2007: 72

According to Nancy, corporeal thinking means that one has to abandon the bold assumption that there could be any action, including any thought, that would not be rooted in a culturally specific, a genuinely marginal and fringy resonance. A resonance of the situation and its meaning: Sound that is musically listened to, that is gathered and scrutinized for itself, not, however, as an acoustic phenomenon (or not merely as one) but as a resonant meaning, a meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in resonance, and only in resonance. Nancy 2007: 73

This resonance is always responding in specific relation to its own history and its particular situation and thus it can be observed in individual bodily actions and attached to corporeal sensibilities and idiosyncrasies. Expanding this view beyond the subject would mean that theories on sound-as-resonance would have to be regarded as theories on situated and corporeal interactions between creatures, things and physical events manifest in resonating vibrations anthropoids like to call sounds. Individual bodies react to noises of any electrical, mechanical or electronic machine nearby (e.g. a video projector), they are embedded in a resonating nexus, a vibrational force (Goodman 2010: 81–4) and yours as well as my thinking are put in motion by these

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generative forces. A monist and perceptually radical epistemology is then implicit to the writings by Steve Goodman and Jean-Luc Nancy as a symmetrical anthropology (Latour 1991, 1999). A symmetrical and as such post-anthropocentric anthropology operates culturally and historically reflected to question the condition humaine, the condition of the human in culture, not to explore this condition with a normative approach, but to relate a humanoid and its body within a dense, materially and corporeally resonating field of possibilities, flexibilities and other relations of the human. This effort to emphasize present materialities as an indispensable ground for culture is a major issue of the so-called New Materialism; it differs largely from phenomenological studies undeviatingly adhering to a predominance of an anthropoid actor. Listening and sounding exchanges this assumed humanoid predominance for a sonic dominance (Henriques 2010). The corporeal situation of listening addresses a particular sonic, bodily felt sense manifest in sound practices (Altman 1992, Müller-Schulzke 2012) that is beyond any verbal articulation a Sonic Corpus—following Nancy. Eugene T. Gendlin, psychologist and phenomenologist, who proposed the term bodily felt sense for such corporeal manifestations of proprioceptivity, summarizes the multiple forms of knowledge inherent in this bodily felt sense as follows: “Any situation, any bit of practice, implies much more than has ever been said” (Gendlin 1992: 201). In this very minute, for instance, while I am working on this chapter, the neighbors above seem to be listening to a rather urgently swinging and grooving Bob Marley song, which I cannot identify precisely: the ceiling of our apartment seems to abate and to filter the sound, letting only the most significant and deep vocal and bass frequencies get through—the sonic signature of a characteristic Bob Marley production. Luckily, I do not feel disrupted by this vibration entering my working space against my wish. Instead I have to smile, remembering former situations in my life in which I have (maybe even intentionally) had to listen to this music. And I remember once attending an impressive presentation given by Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut on the question: What can a Marley do if digitally zombified as part of a

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posthumous duet? (Piekut and Stanyek 2010) I feel rather lucky and privileged to be able to incorporate this otherwise potentially annoying sonic intervention in my current writing situation as a quite appropriate example of this second remark on the corporeal aspects of sonic epistemologies. Due to this association, my neighbors’ taste in music on this early Monday afternoon in June has a quite generative impact on my writing. The generativity of this sound entering the realm of my private space precisely exemplifies the spatial and corporeal aspects of a listening situation. As such, this tiny intervention shows the main fundamental generative potential in focusing on a listening and sounding situation in all its spatial, corporeal, and situated aspects, which are to be found at the aforementioned intersections between the writings of Nancy, Goodman, and Gendlin. These aspects imply what I would like to call: The Sonic Corpus as concept of a materialist anthropology of idiosyncratic, sensible interferences and interpenetrations between related sound actors.

How to think beyond logocentrism? Both the transformations of and challenges to epistemology discussed in the two sections so far lead to an issue which has been at stake in critical theory for quite some time now. But not until recently has it seemed that the discourse, the production techniques, and the practices within sound studies were blossoming in such a way that one might turn to the problems inherent to focusing on reductive, languagerelated and syllogistic models of understanding sound or the senses in general. Whereas in academia these are the primary forms in which arguments are presented, questioned, and discussed, it becomes more and more obvious that such an approach tends to reproduce clichés and even an essentialism of structure when applied to the sensory experience of anthropoids. Arguing with the senses implies the logic of ever multiplying values, that cannot be subsumed by structuralist approaches.

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Let me give you an example of a situation where a specific sound event, which I can look at and listen to, takes place. For instance, my experience of how The Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) presented their latest video essay, titled People to be Resembling at the Haus der Kunst in Munich (The Otolith Group 2013). In standing in front of the screen watching this video, in listening to the accompanying music recorded by Don Cherry, Colin Walcott, and Nana Vasconcelos in 1978, in listening to a recording of Gertrude Stein reading a passage from The Making of Americans on top of this musical piece—“There are many ways of making kinds of men and women” (Stein 1966: 290)—and in watching photographs shown in the video from the original recording sessions in Ludwigsburg in the 1970s, sorting the celluloid and the photographic negatives—in doing all of this, I just go with the flow of this essayistic video. I might not identify all the details at first sight or sound. But I like to take my time for this heterogeneous and highly contingent meeting of sensory artifacts. And I like to enjoy the sheer qualities of colors and noises, of cuts and layers, of astonishing sound events, compositional structures and inspiringly developing connections between moving images, sounds, words, and flow. After the video has ended I feel soothed. I feel refreshed and full of questions, phrases, and ideas, possible arguments and possible worlds in which this artifact would make sense to me. But I take my time. I do not rush. With both expert and background knowledge at hand, I might now be able to elaborate a bit on this work by Otolith in words and in arguments: how it might have been historically constructed; how it might be technologically advanced or outdated; how I might link it to a more original or a more restricted theoretical model of sound. I may even be able to describe how a communication process is put forward by the specific listening and watching situation implied by the piece. And I might do this by scrutinizing the semiotic operations dominating this piece—or the mathematical operations equally dominant, especially in Stein’s text that is actually based on algorithmic operations. All of this might even be of a certain interest to some of the readers of this

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chapter—but still: Would it be of any relevance to a situation in which you would actually listen to this piece? There might be instances of sound art and video art in which historical, contextual, and referential clarifications would change an individual’s inspiration by or rejection of a particular work. But there are—(I assume) a lot more—cases in which such additional information surely will not change my experience at all. This fact, which might be hard to swallow for the majority of academics, is exactly the main argument of the mathematician, cultural historian, and philosopher Michel Serres in Les Cinq Sens from 1985. In this volume he argues very clearly that—as researchers and as hommes or femmes de lettres, but also just as a common man in writing cultures—one has to be aware of what one is convincingly able to say and write about something, however vigorous, energetic, and fervent it may be, might in the end not be close to truth at all. It could as easily be a merely pretty sounding theoretical artifact, sensorily detached and actually contradicted by experience. Such a habit of speaking and writing, rapidly and fluently, Serres names the golden mouth, la “bouche d’or” (Serres 1985: 166). This golden mouth speaks eloquently and it has convincing arguments and concise descriptions quick at hand at any given moment. Though this might seem a quite desirable ability, Serres sees this as one the most harmful déformations professionelles of academia and research—and surely he is right. He proposes a massive slow down: instead of letting yourself being taken over too fast by your own habitual phrases and arguments, your knowledge and your ideas, he proposes that one takes her or his time to simply perceive, to let an experience sink in, to get a genuinely profound and radiating sense of what is actually taking place around us, at this very instant. Such an extended, intense, and also exclusive experience, such an epoché, harbors the potential of a far more inspiring understanding and interpretation of the sensory events going on around you, a potential that can be explicated at a later point. Serres is therefore making a plea for a situated empiricism and sensualism, and for the epistemic value of pure experience. This emphasis on the continuity between sensing and thinking, between experience and

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reflection, is a late resonance of the radical empiricism William James (1912) proposed a century ago. James then insisted, similar to Serres, on an experiential continuity that needed not to overcome any separation between experience and reasoning: [T]here is in general no separateness needing to be overcome by an external cement; and whatever separateness is actually experienced is not overcome, it stays and counts as separateness to the end. But the metaphor serves to symbolize the fact that experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges. That one moment of it proliferates into the next by transitions which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue, can not, I contend, be denied. Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is ‘of ’ the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the past’s continuation; it is ‘of ’ the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it. James 1912: 89

Such transitions of one’s experience (prospectively as well as retrospectively) are not per se covered by a verbal argument—but rather by a narration, by poetry, or by the arts. So, to hesitate and to progress only after having granted yourself the time to experience something, and to deliberately scrutinize the transitions of such a process, that is the proposition which both James and Serres make. For both, the experiential is a fundamental and generative force, as it contributes to (or even is) the creation of meaning (Gendlin 1962). This generative quality of a situated experience can be observed as soon as one invents new and very specific, rich statements in language for describing any sensory experience. This language does not emerge out of the matrix of known phrases, idioms, and vocabularies—but out of a truly inspiring, situated, and often erratic experience, which leaves us speechless, maybe stuttering or blushing (cf. Gendlin 1992). I listen again to the recording of Gertrude Stein’s voice; I turn again to People to

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be Resembling. It seems to me as if I am hearing very soft and tiny, almost nanoscopic noises, incredibly evanescent and yet very present; sounds that may be a recording of someone flicking through the photographs and photographic negatives. I am not sure whether I actually do hear these noises or if I am imagining them whilst watching the video. Watching it once more, I still hear them. I like them and I like to indulge in them. For maybe a minute or so they seem to me to be the most striking and impressive element in this video. This impression of course changes again, soon after. Drawing on Serres, James, and Gendlin it seems that sonic thinking also emphasizes the experiential and generative sides of listening and sounding in situ. This means that as a supplement to, or maybe even in spite of, the undoubtedly powerful discourses implemented in contemporary cultures, it is necessary not to neglect the status of the individual experience of a phenomenon. To understand this as a merely arbitrary or only subjective experience would be to underestimate the non-arbitrary qualities of individual experience and individual subjectivities. As such, it only goes to show how contemporary logocentric research and writing culture often neglect (via individual speakers and protagonists) the fact that no humanoid could possibly be capable of experiencing this world as a well-tempered, objective, and neatly organized model of arguments and examples. Instead one encounters the world as a succession of individual, incredibly tiny and particular situations and experiences, which might be erratic and scary, hasty and hectic, lame and boring, eluding and inspiring, all in surprising comminglings. Stressing these experiential moments in combination with their contextualization and historicization might provide a subtle and inspiring empirical foundation as a way to start and to guide a sonic analysis. Such an analysis, corporeal and blatantly aware of the pitfalls of its own logocentrism, seems to be far more appropriate to the field of the sonic than one which would proceed exclusively to describe the lines of signal processing, the communication processes, or the information theories behind sonic events. To transcend such generalizing and abstraction-driven scripted experience, this scripted

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evidence, would then equip researchers with the means of articulating, of reflecting and of manifesting specific experiences within a particular sonic situation. To write such a thick description (Geertz 1973), such an intense and personal narration of an auditory experience and one’s highly idiosyncratic, explorative, essayistic reflections on it, is then to think imaginatively offering: Experientiality and generativity as means to transcend scripted, traditional, and logocentric discourses on the sonic.

How to think imaginatively? So far, thinking about sound has led me to a discussion of aspects of spatiality, of corporeality, and of logocentrism in research and in the arts. At the end of the previous section it seemed that an individual imaginary, incorporating both a bodily self-perception and a sense of spatial situations, could have the potential to play a major part in research on the sonic: That humming background sound is ancient—the ringing of a huge bell. Exploding into a mass of intensely hot matter, pulsing out vast sound waves, contracting and expanding the matter, heating where compressed, cooling where it was less dense. This descending tone parallels the heat death of the universe, connecting all the discrete atoms into a vibrational wave. This cosmic background radiation is the echo of the big bang. Goodman 2010: 81

In the year 13.7 billion B.C. Steve Goodman, the author of these lines, was not yet born—nor was any other anthropoid or any of its predecessors. Nor did anything exist which one could name earth or planet or even locatable matter. The author is very vividly describing a moment just briefly after the Big Bang—or should I say: the author is imagining it? Any author legitimates the relevance of his or her writing not least by the relevance of the objects of description he or she chooses.

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For instance, writing about international politics, important inventors and entrepreneurs, or major inventions of science, has for a long time been deemed far more relevant tasks for historiography than writing about social and everyday practices of maintaining a larger family household, more important than the subtle interactions in teaching, and a lot more important than the arduous work of cleaning the work environment for a large group of people. But the contemporary social field within which any author writes is the main determinant of ascription of such relevance and importance. Thus, writing about the Big Bang can be quite joyful and, at the same time, it is a strong proclamation of the author’s assumed relevance. But yet, Goodman integrates his interpretation of the Big Bang in the latter part of the first third of his book. Hillel Schwartz goes a bold step further, as he starts his cultural history of Making Noise (Schwartz 2011) with age-old narrations of the Big Bang and of creational situations in mythology and literature. His book thus resembles an ultimate encyclopedia of unwanted sounds—an (un)holy book of noises. In the paragraph by Goodman, cited above, and in similar passages written by Schwartz, the imaginative versatility and rhetorical skill of its author affect me as a reader immediately and deeply. While reading Goodman’s paragraph, I am actually teleported through time—by my imagination—to the situation briefly after the Big Bang. It makes me try to imagine at least some elements of its auditory and sensory quality. The pervasive effect an imaginative text might have on us, the narrative immersion, the experiencing via imagination, has been quite a wellknown fact and poetic technique in literary writing for ages and across different genres and cultures. But in many fields of research—outside of ethnographic field research for instance—it might be a rather surprising but yet effective approach to analysis not only in retrospect but also in synchronic approaches: experientiality and generativity take effect as soon as a sensorial experience catches our attention. In these moments one’s body, or—to be more precise—one’s flesh, the empire of the senses (Howes 2004) guides the thinking: a sonic, a corporeal epistemology (Schulze 2015). Here I am obviously following the train of thought that

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Merleau-Ponty laid out in his late works on the body and on the imagination. In these he explored (which is in close proximity to the thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy) how anthropoids perceive themselves, not as the signifying and tidily constructed bodily machines known from anatomy, but more as a sensory formation in flesh (Merleau-Ponty 1945). Humanoids as you and me do not actually live in logocentrically arranged and immovable structures of bodily functions. On the contrary, at any given moment one is experiencing a quite particular generativity of the flesh: you sense and think, I resonate and react—both are we continuously transforming and transmuting. Because of this generative character of experience it becomes both problematic and challenging to manifest, to transmit, and to analyze individual sonic sensations. At this point the aforementioned cultural technique of narrating, of poetry, and of art becomes crucial as method. Imagination might be (and has been for ages) manifested and articulated in artifacts that evoke those imaginations; not arguments, not logically connected chains of signs and characters—but ones that bear all the richness of our experience. Narrations that manage to transmit an experiential depth and density to any person close enough to our cultural sphere. This skill to invent and to construct such poetic, truly new artifacts is what I call generativity. This concept—previously smuggled in to this chapter—originates from the sociology of aging (Kahlert 2012) and, in parallel, from the study of generative principles in the arts (Hay 1979, 2002). Both fields use this concept to refer to the erudite and mature ability to bring something into the world that effectively activates, inspires, and motivates others. Generativity is a much more open concept than for instance neighboring ones like creativity, productivity, or even work: concepts that are so deeply rooted in nineteenth-century concepts of industrial production and Eurocentric cultural hegemony that one could easily be witnessing them disappear as major concepts in the next decades. The most prominent example of a highly generative and imaginative writing on sound might be the sonic fiction of Kodwo Eshun (Eshun 1998, Schulze 2012, 2013a; Voegelin 2014). Writing a sonic fiction requires a sensory

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exploration into the processes of sound and into one’s individual appropriation of modes of listening (Chion 1994)—as well as into one’s idiosyncratic sonic experiences and imaginations. Eshun, his colleague Steve Goodman and—mutatis mutandis—also the sound artist and sound art scholar Salomé Voegelin are, so far, the most prolific writers and researchers who apply this approach of sonic and sensory fictions: rich with knowledge, experience and versatility, and just as rich in suggestions, imaginations, in phantasies and unsettling dreams. These are exactly the sources too often neglected in logocentric writing on sound, which, however, provide ways of understanding how various listeners experience sonic environments very differently. For instance, how Kodwo Eshun listens to the PhonoFictions (Eshun 1998: 121) inherent in the vinyl records issued by the three-person-collective known as Underground Resistance or UR : In UR , a constantly proliferating series of sonic scenarios take the place of lyrics. Sonic Fictions, PhonoFictions generate a landscape extending out into possibility space. These give the overwhelming impression that the record is an object from the world it releases. This interface between Sonic Fiction and track, between concept and music, isn’t one of fiction vs Reality or truth vs falsity. Sonic Fiction is the packaging which works by sensation transference from outside to inside. The front sleeve, the back sleeve, the gatefold, the inside of the gatefold, the record itself, the label, the CD cover, Sleevenotes, the CD itself; all of these are surfaces for concepts, texture-platforms for PhonoFictions. Concept feeds back into sensation, acting as a subjectivity engine, a machine of subjectivity that peoples the world with audio hallucinations. Parliament populates the world with cartoon universes; Sun Ra seeds the world with composition planets. Scientist reprograms the positioning of satellites, setting all chronosystems to warptime. Eshun 1998: 121

Eshun takes us right into his personal machinery of imagination and immersion, which is triggered by the sound productions of Underground Resistance. He introduces us to what I termed a narrative immersion in

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the above; a sensation transference by means of the materiality of all the details in such a record. Or as the title of the quoted paragraph states: Sonic Fiction Is a Subjectivity Engine (Eshun 1998: 121)—a material engine that is connected to your listening body, to your incorporated idiosyncratic imagination, your sonic corpus. Generativity in action. For sound studies in general the potential of ambitious and poetically suggestive narration lies in exactly this transference of sensation. The individual but also highly intersubjective interpretation of sonic situations—as presented by Eshun, by Goodman, but also by Schwartz or Voegelin—might be analyzed via its ripples on the imagination of a particular, highly responsive listener. A sonic fiction is manifest in an artwork, in a sound piece, in conceptual sketches, or in any fiction in any medium the listener likes to choose. The contact between the listening researcher and the sound emitting situation or constellation generates this machine of imagination, this Subjectivity Engine (Eshun): an engine that manifests sonic traces, that makes it possible to come closer to the specific trajectories and signatures of how a specific sound performance proceeds, tumbles, and turns. Sounding and listening become apparent as an integrated aggregation that is only thinkable and operationable in cohesion, in corporeal listening and sound. The researcher-as-listener is, then, the best and—by now—the only reliable instrument of measuring personal affects by auditory experiences. An individual sonic persona (Schulze 2013b) thus unfolds his or her individual approach to the sounding world by applying: Imaginative thinking in the form of sonic fiction as a method to transfer sensation by means of a poetic or narrative immersion.

The generativity of the flesh As you have been reading this chapter, at least one other soundscape did surround both you, your reading, and your understanding and doubts concerning my thoughts on sonic thinking. Or were there many

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different sonic environments? A quite different amount of noises, a number of annoying and (possibly) distracting or even disturbing sounds, a wide variety of non-, anti- or unsounds (Goodman 2010) did also accompany my efforts of conceiving, researching, writing, and revising this chapter. These noises and annoyances, listening experiences, and sonic discoveries I have tried to grant access to this chapter. “Sometime someone will know all the ways there are for people to be resembling, someone sometime then will have a completed history of everyone” (Stein 1966: 290). Not only to exemplify the material effect such sounds might have on a person, but also to perforate my own text and its argument with sonically erratic moments. They can now and then seem irrelevant, maybe they make you furious—but nevertheless they act as truly generative in the course of an argument: representing the generativity of the flesh. A generativity that integrates spatial, corporeal, post-logocentric, and imaginative modes of reflecting sounding and listening. This chapter surely appeared to lose track at some points. As I finish writing this sentence, a police car with its easily recognizable siren is driving by. And then this chapter tried to get back on it. A bit later a series of huge motorcycles follow. Thinking with, through and beyond sounds. My laptop’s hard drive is still forming the gray and clicking general bass. Resonating, generating, reflecting. Researching on sounds while being immersed in these sounds.

Notes 1 “Quand le corps n’est plus vivant, n’a plus de tonus, il passe soit dans la rigor mortis, (la rigidité cadavérique), soit dans l’inconsistance de la pourriture. Être un corps, c’est être un certain ton, une certaine tension. Je dirais même aussi qu’une tension est aussi une tenue” (Nancy 1992/2008: 126). 2 “Être à l’écoute, c’est toujours être en bordure du sens, ou dans un sens de bord et d’extrémité et comme si le son n’était précisément rien d’autre que ce bord, cette frange ou cette marge” (Nancy 2002: 21).

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3 “[S]on musicalement écouté, non pas cependant comme phénomène acoustique (ou pas seulement) c’est-à-dire recueilli et scruté pour lui même, non pas comme phénomène acoustique (ou pas seulement) mais comme sens résonant, sens dont le sensé est censé se trouver dans la résonance, et ne se trouver qu’en elle” (Nancy 2002: 21).

Works cited Agamben, G. (2006), Che cos’è un dispositivo? Roma: edizioni nottetempo. Altman, R., ed. (1992), Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York: Routledge. Baudry, J.-L. (1970), “Cinéma: effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base,” in Cinéthique 2(7–8): 1–8. Baudry, J.-L. (1975), “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” in Communications 23, Psychanalyse et cinéma, Éditions de Seuil Paris, 1975 (trans. and ed. P. Rosen (1986), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, New York: Columbia University Press). Bijsterveld, K. (2008), Mechanical Sound. Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Bijsterveld, K. and T. Pinch (2011), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Blesser, B. and L.-R. Salter (2007), Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Born, G. (1995), Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. University of California. Bull, M. (2007), Sound Moves. iPod Culture and Urban Experience. London: Routledge. Bull, M. and L. Back, eds (2003), The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers. Cage, J. (1981), Empty Words. Writings ’73–’78. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Chion, M. (1994), Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press. Cobussen, M., V. Meelberg, and H. Schulze, eds (2013), Towards New Sonic Epistemologies. Journal of Sonic Studies 3(4). Available online: http:// journal.sonicstudies.org/vol04/nr01/a01 (accessed October 1, 2015).

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Codona (1978), Codona, Munich: ECM . Erlmann, V. (2010), Reason and Resonance. A History of Modern Aurality. New York: Zone Books. Eshun, K. (1998), More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books. Foucault, M. (1994), “Le jeu de Michel Foucault (1977),” in D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds), Dits et écrits. Volume 3 (1976–1979), Paris: Gallimard, 298–329. Geertz, C. (1973), “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, 3–30. Gendlin, E. T. (1962), Experience and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective. Evanston/Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Gendlin, E. T. (1992), “The Wider Role of Bodily Sense in Thought and Language,” in M. Sheets-Johnstone (ed.), Giving the Body its Due. Albany : SUNY, 192–207. Goodman, S. (2010), Sonic Warfare. Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Großmann, R. (2008), “Verpasster Medienwandel,” in Positionen – Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 21(74) Dispositiv(e): 6–9. Hay, L. (1979), Essais de critique génétique. Paris: Flammarion. Hay, L. (2002), La Littérature des écrivains: Questions de critique génétique. Paris: José Corti. Howes, D. (2004), The Empire of the Senses. Oxford: Berg Publishers. James, W. (1912), Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Kahlert, H. (2012), Generativität und Geschlecht in alternden Wohlfahrtsgesellschaften: Soziologische Analysen zum Problem des demographischen Wandels. Wiesbaden: Springer VS Verlag. Kittler, F. (1985), Aufschreibesysteme 1800–1900. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. LaBelle, B. (2010), Acoustic Territories. Sound Culture and Everyday Life. London: Continuum. Latour, B. (1991), Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte. Latour, B. (1999), Politiques de la nature. Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie, Paris: La Découverte. Löw, M. (2001), Raumsoziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

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Mauss, M. (1934), “Les Téchniques du Corps,” Journal de Psychologie 32(3–4): 25–47. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945), Phénomenologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Müller-Schulzke, C. (2012), Transcultural Sound Practices. South Asian Sounds and Urban Dance Music in the UK . Dissertation Frankfurt am Main: Goethe University. Nancy, J.-L. (1992), Corpus. Paris: Editions Métailié. Nancy, J.-L. (2002), À l’écoute. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Nancy, J.-L. (2007), Listening. trans. C. Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2008), Corpus. Translated by R.A. Rand. New York: Fordham University Press. Piekut, B. and Stanyek, J. (2010), “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane”, in TDR: The Drama Review 54(1), 14–38. Schafer, R. M. (1977), The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. New York: Destiny Books Rochester. Schmitz, H. (1990), Der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand: Grundzüge der Philosophie. Bonn: Bouvier. Schulze, H., ed. (2008), Sound Studies: Traditionen – Methoden – Desiderate. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Schulze, H. (2012), “The Body of Sound. Sounding out the History of Science,” SoundEffects—An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience 2(1): 196–208. Schulze, H. (2013a), “Adventures in Sonic Fiction. A Heuristic for Sound Studies,” Journal of Sonic Studies 3(4). Available online: http://journal. sonicstudies.org/vol04/nr01/a10. (accessed October 1, 2015). Schulze, H. (2013b), “The Sonic Persona. An Anthropology of Sound,” in A. Michels and C. Wulf (eds), Exploring the Senses: South Asian and European Perspectives on Rituals and Performativity, 181–91. London, New York and New Delhi: Routledge. Schulze, H. (2015), “Corporeal Listening. Functional sounds, les sports glissants and dancing practices,” in J. G. Papenburg and H. Schulze (eds), Sound as Popular Culture: A Research Companion. Cambridge MA : The MIT Press (in press). Schulze, H. and Wulf, C., eds (2007), Klanganthropologie: Performativität – Imagination – Narration. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Schwartz, H. (2011), Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond. New York: Zone Books.

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Serres, M. (1985), Les Cinq Sens: philosophie des corps mêlés. Paris: Grasset. Serres, M. (2009), The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. New York: Continuum Publishers. Stein, G. (1966), The Making of Americans. Chelsea and New York: Something Else Press. Sterne, J. (2003), The Audible Past. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sterne, J., ed. (2012), The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge. The Otolith Group (2013), People to be Resembling. Munich: Haus der Kunst. Voegelin, S. (2014), Sonic Possible Worlds. London: Bloomsbury. Waldenfels, B. (2000), Das leibliche Selbst. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

12

Immanent Non-Musicology: Deleuze|Guattari vs. Laruelle Achim Szepanski

In this essay I try to explore non-representationalism in music, which has to be connected to the question of non-representational aesthetics. The philosophers of immanence—Deleuze|Guattari and Laruelle—have something in common: since the mid-1980s they have rejected the discourses and techniques of post-structuralist interpretation of music and art in favor of constructing an aesthetics rooted in immanence and non-representationalism. Deleuze|Guattari work on the problem of how the relationship between immanence and multiplicity could be thought. They describe a world of pure multiplicity in which all multiplicities are equally immanent and include immanent transformations within a given set of virtualities. Multiplicities actualize themselves as occasions/ events or as blips of singularity in heterogeneous assemblages. In this way the transcendental must get immanent, which means that the universe is not digital at its core, but analog. Deleuze|Guattari and Laruelle agree that representational aesthetics has come to an end, but they do not agree on what form immanence should take in aesthetics. While Deleuze|Guattari prefer the productive capacity of matter, Laruelle insists on the immanent and generic logic of the real/One. For Deleuze|Guattari one of the guiding questions in “music” is if the unformed can be heard as sound within the framework of the audible or music. But the unformed is not noise. So another question is, does there exist a passage between sound and noise, made possible by musical events (not music)? When deterritorialization brings along a de-structuration of the articulated sound, which is a kind of deterritorialized and reterritorialized noise, this implies a state of the 243

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unformed that is still audible, but definitely not as organized music; such kind of “music” or the audible is no more a representation or mimesis, but a becoming. For Deleuze|Guattari such (unformed) sound-becomings take place within a three dimensional floating space (rhizome) rather than in a two-dimensional, vectorial one. In his current period Laruelle is in search for a quantum thought that is free from its mathematical expression that he finds reductive. One principle of quantum thought is “superposition“ or the standing wave of rhythmic superposition, a kind of concept, that resonates somehow with the work of Lefebvre, Deleuze, Stengers, and Whitehead, but also with recent sound studies. The Laruellian concept of “superposition” neglects two treatments of sonic thought, so to invent sonic thinking as non-representation (that is, thinking sonically rather than about sound). Laruelle illustrates an incommensurability of sound’s closure, hermetically separated from other material, theories; and he illustrates an incommensurability of the relation and exchange of sound, which is porous enough to permit heterogeneous assemblages without imposing them. While closure includes representation as thinking about sound, permanent exchange between sound and thought tends to confusion as it converts or even fuses thinking and sound. This con-fusion reflects the belief of experimental electronic music in its first period (from Russolo through Schaeffer and classic musique concrète) that everything in the world is musical, an unrecognized belief associated with what Jarrod Fowler calls the Principle of Musical Sufficiency (Fowler, n.d.). Non-musicology, by contrast, breaks with the idea that everything is musical and develops a science of music as well as a “music” related to science (e.g. Xenakis’s use of stochastic processes). For Fowler, “the program of Non-musicology is to use musicology to construct alien theories without those theories being yielded by the Principle of Musical Sufficiency: ‘All is not musical, this is our news’ ” (Fowler n.d.). Sonic thought or Non-musicology composes theory as its own object and therefore delivers a kind of echo to the work of the musicians, to their way of the becoming-of-music. Laruelle starts to write a new music-fiction.

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What is noise? The conception of noise under the aspect of irreversibility is associated with a logic of radical contingency. On one side noise is observer relative, so it may be measured by systems according to their degree of randomness, their algorithmic functions, on the other side noise is observer independent, as radical contingency or hyperchaos noise exceeds human capacity of perception for capturing it as a phenomenal information. The definition of noise as failure or disturbance presupposes the position of an objectivized ideal in and of science, to exclude noise and the composition of noise, thus thinking the real always as a correlate of thought. Here we are already in the middle of the problematic of Laruelles’ Non-musicology, which situates music as a product of science, their methods of numerical measure (as material), and (which is more important) as the construction of some kind of audible non-order, which might not be measurable. Non-musicology starts on this plane as a different treatment of music and experimental science, breaking with the idea that everything is musical and therefore developing a science of “music,” which does not become science itself. The infiltration of Non-musicology into musicology means the mutation of music using scientific methods to investigate a pluralism and hybridization in a generic science, which does not comment musical objects in a reflective way, but concentrates them around a problem, of which Laruelle had no idea in his early phase, but which musicians had already generated. Non-musicology breaks not only with musical self-sufficiency or structured science of music, but also articulates another break that does not so much involve a new subversive immersion of the audience into the conditions of hearing as it leads to the ecological anticause, what Fowler calls a different hearing-in-Rhythm, which is identical with Rhythm insofar as Rhythm is different from metrics and recurrence. What is Rhythm? First, Rhythm is a temporally extended pattern that can be described by information-processing systems through several parameters summarized by Inigo Wilkins: spatial, temporal, amplitude, frequency and superposition (Wilkins 2013). While processing systems involve an observer-dependent reality of Rhythm, it

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is possible to discover the existence of Rhythms that are beyond human sensory perceptual capacities through technology, math, and science. Second, it has to be asked whether or not there is a simple opposition between noise and Rhythm. The answer is no, because we can define Rhythm as the relation of identifiable and unidentifiable processes that allow the incommensurable chaos to pass into an order of difference, a degree or quantity of non-linear and non-rhythmic noise. Rhythm may exist at many degrees of dynamics and magnitude. It may emerge from noise, whereby the simulation of noise through stochastic processes demonstrates that the process of the enfolding of Rhythm and signals offers a large quantity of heterogeneous movements occurring at different time scales and frequencies. But still noise has a larger dynamics and magnitude than Rhythm. Noise is foreclosed to Rhythm, to sound and music, to any ontological or epistemological theory. If Rhythm is distinct from metrics, we enter the field of non-frequency politics, the politics of productive difference, which includes the fact, that Rhythm is distinct from science, and therefore non-musicians use science and music as pure material. Here, they also start to reduce discourses of philosophy to pure material to achieve—always in interaction with hearing-in-rhythm—pulse “rhythmights.” Parallel to the objects of non-musicians a unified and non-representational theory or a music-fiction has to simulate philosophy and to catch for the essence of music-being and the fractal-being of musical objects, and yet treat them through hypothesis, deduction, and experimental tests. The non-musicological term invented by Fowler, “rhythmight,” opens up to experimental methods of rhythm production: we can now speak of Rhythm in terms of non-periodic pulsed or clicked music. We find here transversal disjunctions, heterogeneous temporalities and spatial components, that overlap and coexist in a track; in the invincible evidence of its short signal and contextless reference, the click opens various potentials to move on without giving any noticeable association. Through the concatenation of signs something like indetermination starts to be indicated, whereby failure can become part of music. Failure is not an inscribed meaning in clicks and cuts, but rather a referential

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that indicates possibilities of previous and emerging sign concatenations. In the nameless “in between,” meaning is constructed with the help of signs that are not what they pretend to be. Through reference to other signs, a momentum of meaning is produced, because a sign like the click realizes différance, suspended presence, while also referring to signs to come. Similarly, the pulse can be understood as an inherent stress that falls on certain metrics or beats. While listening to the clock, one might hear “tick-tock” instead of “tick-tick,” because every other beat is more stressed than the beat before. This repeating stress is the pulse; and in music different sorts of pulses can be overlapped and constructed by grouping beats together in different milieus or patterns. The technique of inhuman music forces a temporal division into such nuanced patterns, which only machines can perform with perfect precision. With Deleuze or Boulez we can speak of rhythm in terms of non-periodic pulsed or clicked music. There is a transversal disjunction, which is articulated in the track intern and in relation to other tracks, and this achieves the transition of “Clicks and Cuts.” Transversality is originally a topological concept meaning an extending over, lying across, intersecting without a resulting coincidence, while transversal music caulks the “cut” between actual and virtual on the rise of the performance itself, by mutating from a device designed to connect the past with the present into a newly future-orientated one. If we listen to a track, we always hear other things, which Deleuze describes as forces, duration, sensation and lightness, depending how tempi, rhythm and sound are varied. For heterogeneous temporalities and spatial components, which overlap and coexist in a track, the click opens in its invincible evidence various potentials to move on, as the signal is short and without contextual reference, so no remindable association can be given. Only through the catenation of signs does something like indetermination start to get indicatory, whereby failure can get part of music, but, as we said, failure is not an inscribed meaning in clicks and cuts, rather a referential, which indicates possibilities of previous and coming sign catenations. In the nameless in between meaning is constructed with the help of signs, which are not what they pretend to be.

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This is quite close to Heinrich Kleist’s proposal, that for producing powerful rhythmights the puppet player has to become itself an automat, insofar as a machinist has to relocate himself into the emphasis of the machine, while emphasis is here armed with a new attraction, which correlates to the following: when non-frequency-politicians are listening to the clock, they hear “tic-toc-fuck the clock” instead of “tik-tik” because they know that the beat or metrum has to be stressed: the relation between the different speed of waves and the maxima of intensity or timeless degree of different waves constitute a dispersion, which cannot be measured. Exterior to the clockban non-frequencypolitics is the supertrace, is the tracing of the immanent rhythmicity of Rhythm in the hearing-in-Rhythm, as Jarrod Fowler says, it is “flow an sich” or the quantum, because the generators of non-frequencypolitics are always oversweeping the beat of the significant “ding ding ding ding.” Here we find a hotspot to non-music in a Laruellian sense. Laruelle claims a dispersive a priori of theory, which is not primarily related to music, but related to the foreclosed and indifferent real in-the-lastinstance, posing the question: how can a generic and real but nevertheless transcendental and a priori term of difference be constructed, an a priori of difference that is a matter of an immediate given condition (Laruelle 2001)? If we relate the a priori or the axiom to music, we will find an answer: the relation between the different speed of waves and the maxima of intensity (or the timeless degree of different waves) involves a dispersion. This is an oraxiom of Rhythmight, which means that the philosophical distinction between theoretical and practical aspects of thought has lost its power. For example, the theoretical practise of music, which invent new oraxioms, uses as its material sample politics, which is oscillating between an actual pool of samples and the capacity to create new samples. Samples are nowadays part of the mediapool, regardless of whether they are saved on analog or digital media. Sampling includes the program-controlled, machinic transformation of the musical material with special features, transposing, time-stretching, or cut up, etc.

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Sampling is a technology for access and transformation of media material, by grasping the signals of the media of transmission. Sampling subverts the purposeful transfer from source to destination. Instead of an exact process of mapping the input onto the output, sampling activates a production process, using the signal subtracted from its functional and contextual environment. As a condition of that production, it is a sampling-in-the-last-instance. Going from sampling to so-called pulse rhythmights, produced with techniques through immanent and generic methods of percussive flights and differential structures of sound, attends not to being-in-theworld, but being in music. A music that remains radically immanent, Rhythmight is constructed from the heterogeneity of Rhythm as foreclosed and incommensurately sampled-in-the-last-instance and binds at the same moment the methods of Rhythmics to ecological hearing-in-rhythm. The relation between Rhythm and hearing still remains unilateral: it only goes one way. The unilaterality of Rhythm does not imply that music can be reduced to Rhythm, but that, aside from its territorial motives and melodic landscapes, music is in-thelast-instance Rhythm and heard from Rhythm. While Non-musicology imposes a unilateral relationship between Rhythm and hearing, hearing-in-Rhythm cannot affect Rhythm, while Rhythm is foreclosed to hearing-in-Rhythm. The scientific exology (the scientific closure of paradigms, knowledge, etc.) of hearing, which arises from the indifference of Rhythm, must hallucinate music as metrics, order, and composition by ignoring the radical ecology of Rhythm, which is related to non-music’s objectivity without representation (Fowler n.d.). At the same time, rhythmight corresponds to a relative ecology (perception of music) that is today permanently infiltrated by the convertibility of money, the processes in which the virtuality of value is actualized as price. At this juncture Non-musicology has to indicate a radical mutation of the radical ecology of Rhythm according to the foreclosed real. (Non-musicology countermands the inscription of the “Differenziant Wert” [differential value], which is the prevalence of money in all its registers—semiotic value and the beat of the significant,

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which counts the metrum as price instead of the tic-toc of the pulsating difference as non-price. Punctuated production time of the code is permanently inscribed in the body of music. At this point, one may mention that there must be a clandestine relation between non-frequency-politics and High-Frequency-Trading. The latter can be understood as a complex technical system in capitalist finance that generates the production of noise and at the same time reduces the information gradients, operating at a high rate of data streams and coding noise. With High-Frequency-Trading financial systems try to regulate the randomness of assets in minimal scales of time, to anticipate the fluctuations of price politics. Complexity is here the random effect of acceleration towards volatility, which can lead to an intentional production of noise, for irritating traders and the financial machines. But in relation to music we prefer here not to speak first of absolute contingency, like one might do with Quentin Meillassoux, instead we follow what distinguishes electronic music from High-FrequencyTrading, because the former in its decomposition in the form of non-music exceeds measurability; acceleration, which is necessary—it can also be slowness—for decoding scripture and codes, should not lead to the hyperreal of Baudrillard, which introduces the universal trauma of capitals realism, instead acceleration in its different modes should lead to a kind of non-dialectical negativism.) Through tracing the rhythmicity of Rhythm in hearing-in-Rhythm, and thus through Sampling-in-the-last-instance, Non-musicology develops a new radical ecology of rhythm. It starts to sample material from science and philosophy, from musical material itself, to construct the immanent generic matrix, which is no longer overdetermined by capital’s relations of production and circulation, rather the transcendental construction of a kind of objectivity without representation. If Non-music or non-standard music is, as Inigo Wilkins says, situated in the “non-standard phase space” between periodic sine tones and non-periodic or non-individual complex transformation and modulation, it might fall within the same theoretical neighborhood as Dante’s bourdon or Messiaen’s compositional techniques.1 The latter

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combines listening to the rhythmic singing of each individual bird and the overall Rhythm as an orchestra. On one side, there is no total rhythmic disorder, analogous to the incommensurability of closure, as unrelated tones do not couple with one another; on the other side, the birds are not synchronized to the ticking clock, as though a regular pulse would allow them all to share a common beat. Now, it looks as though non-frequency-politics would be nothing other than a re-invention of Dante’s bourdon; but the ritornello of the birds as accompanied by the noise of the wood is not only a musical sensation. It forces Rhythm via an interaction with hearing-in-Rhythm, in order to find a radical objective music, which includes the refusal of the world, even the refusal to create alternative worlds, yet demands the real as foreclosed to the world. Rhythmight produces tension and solidification at the same time in hearing-in-Rhythm, while non-musicians become aware of how to subtract Rhythm from the metrum, endlessly mixing and remixing the conditions and relations of rhythmights and at the same time separating fragments from these mixtures in order to use these autonomous theoretical fragments indifferent to the musical structure. Laruelle would reject Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of music as the capture of affects and percepts (including a relationship between material and forces) and would instead postulate to music an autonomous theoretical order, a non-scientific thought according to the radical immanence of the real—the real, here, understood as foreclosed and indifferent, without mirroring aesthetics or knowledge or being mirrored by science; the real, which has to be thought as neither a meaning nor a truth but rather as immanently given-without givenness. The exteriority of the real is being-nothing, which confronts being with nothingness. This demands the real as foreclosed to the world. By reducing all transcendental thought to pure material, thought can be developed according to the syntax of the real. Instead of a truth, which has its telos in the white silence of a full speaking, in which even the real should be countable, Non-musicology presents an incestuous con-junction of the quantum-principles of superposition (immanence of one-in-one) and non-commutativity.

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Where Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between scientific variables, artistic varieties, and philosophical variations, Laruelle’s Non-philosophy reduces all concepts of philosophy and philosophy itself to pure variables.2 Non-musicology reduces philosophy, science, and musical objects to pure material, by starting to sample the material from within non-musical discourses such as science and philosophy. By cutting off the Principle of Musical Sufficiency, the immersive properties of sound in relation to perception and affect might be also cut off. Non-music instead produces an irreflective processing of variables by variables, a fractal proliferation of models without transcendence. Here we are confronted with radical differences in the aesthetic conceptions of Deleuze|Guattari and Laruelle. The movement and the relation of sound molecules itself, their catenation happens for Deleuze|Guattari in the context of rhythmical territorialization and de-territorialization, which they describe as the ritornell, a kind of crystallization of time-space, the temporalization of space and the spatialization of time. Within the ritornell body, earth, rhythm and sound events are shortened with the intensity of the body without organs. Non-musicology in this context could be subsequent to what Laruelle understood as the production and tracking of Rhythmicity of rhythm in hearing-in-rhythm, as an event of compression, which writes itself as an effect of the rhythm construction of the ritornell. As such “music” or the audible has a fractal dimension, which cannot be reduced to metrics, number and beat time, and maybe to objects for philosophers. And non-frequency politics would force the dance through the territorialized ritornell, which constituents its rhythm and its apparatus, the drum. Rhythmight is producing tension and solidification at the same time in hearing-in-rhythm, while getting aware, how to subtract the metrum. TIC-TOC-fuck the clock! means the principle, while endlessly mixing and remixing the conditions and relations of rhythmights and at the same time separating rudiments from these mixtures, in order to use autonomous (theoretical) fragments, a theoretical order of contingency (to music), which implies to make use of artificial techniques in a different way as musicians do and at the same write new music-fictions, which are

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still related to music and the audible—a non-scientific thought according to the radical immanence of the real in-the-last-instance, the real here understood as foreclosed and being-nothing, without mirroring something or being mirrored. Laruelle’s generalized fractality of thought is a radically unfolded plane of immanence without reflection of the world, while destroying the empirico-transcendental doublet by its distanceless adequation. This is to abandon also reversibility between philosophy and science, and between science and music; non-musicology leads to practice “music” in a non-scientific stance to mutate music using scientific means related to the practice of science, as Jarrod Fowler says. The result of Non-philosophy and Non-musicology includes a generic matrix, which is transcendental at the same time, a generic matrix, whose idempotency functions are related to the real as determination-in-the-last-instance. Idempotency is a term of informatics that refers to a function that remains unchanged by doubling and iterating itself or by the addition of new functions, so the generic matrix is related to non-commutative identity which persists across variations and does not need any transcendence. Deleuze|Guattari renounce representation, but still in the name of perception and affects, which are always correlated to experience. And this concept correlates somehow to a certain phase of Laruelle, where the non-musical construction of the rhythmight of music and science is combined with hearing, hearing-in-rhythm, with musicological systems of listening. Laruelle would assert a further step, where non-musicology reduces philosophy, science, and musical objects to pure material, by starting to sample the material from within music, non-musical discourses such as science and philosophy. By cutting off the principle of musical sufficiency, the immersive properties of sound in relation to perception and affect are also cut off. Instead non-musicfiction is producing an irreflective and automatic processing of variables by variables, which is a fractal proliferation of models without transcendence. Audio, as the material of media pools, is not further related anymore “to a transindividually constituted prosthetic extension with reversible intentionality,” as Inigo Wilkins says.

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In his latest works, Laruelle speaks of the non-standard method as a kind of immanent fiction that includes invention, construction, performance, etc., as a non-representative and non-expressive method that uses only abstract and pure thought for non-aesthetics and that does not need to appeal to the parallelism of philosophy and art.3 This demands neither thinking of sound as sonic philosophy nor thinking about sound, but an abstract theory of sound, a radical abstract theory that is absolutely non-worldly and non-perceptual, as Laruelle says. Music is not oriented to a world, nor is it perceptual; rather it focuses on the immanent character of music as such, being in music. Music is radical objectivation without representation or intentionality. Following Laruelle, this semblance of music must be no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation or a representation of world or of language, of affect or whatever. Rather there exists a non-world of music for both the musician and the philosopher of music. This non-world still exists in the present and is real, while non-music is always rooted in matter. At this point Non-musicology stops tracing the Rhythmicity of Rhythm in hearing-in-Rhythm through sampling-in-the-last-instance. As a kind of objectivity without representation, Non-musicology begins instead to sample material from science and philosophy, from musical material itself, to construct the immanent generic matrix of non-music, which is no longer overdetermined by the capitalist relation of production and circulation.

Notes 1 See Dante (n.d.) and Wilkins (2013). 2 See Deleuze and Guattari (1994) and Laruelle (2008: 200). 3 See for example Laruelle (2013).

Works Cited Dante (n.d.), Purgatorio Canto XXVIII , 7–19.

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Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Fowler, J. (n.d.), JMF075. Available online: http://www.jarrodfowler. com/JMF 075.html (accessed October 30, 2015). Laruelle, F. (2001), “The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter”, trans. Ray Brassier, Pli 12: 33–40. Laruelle, F. (2008), Introduction aux sciences géneriques. Paris: Editions Petra. Laruelle, F. (2013), Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy, trans. R. Mackay. London: Bloomsbury. Wilkins, I. (2013), Enemy of Music. Available online: http://irreversiblenoise. wordpress.com/2013/03/06/enemy-of-music/ (accessed October 30, 2015).

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Sonic Figure: The Sound of The Black Soft Julia Meier

[. . .] a-ha, a-ha, a-ha, a-ha, a-ha. Electronicfucksonic (The Black Soft 2011) Sound, generally, has the capacity to create a piece of information, a sign that can only be rendered and understood via a direct experience with and through the audible. This means that we basically are not able to grasp it intelligibly in our common coded forms of language. Sound is what affects us immediately and goes right into our body, thus it is rather felt through resonances and vibrations—most of the time rhythmic—that one absorbs almost osmotically.1 The human body in connection with its mind then becomes a resonating body itself that can be shaped through sounds—without making intelligible, graspable sense of it. Edgar Allan Poe’s epigraph in his famous tale The Fall of the House of Usher quotes De Béranger: “Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne.” (“His heart is a suspended lute, as soon as it is touched, it resounds”) (Poe 1998: 109). The shaping is raw and pure without the distance of reflection but with immediate reaction. The music of the New York-based duo The Black Soft2 is best described as an eclectic mix of 1980s synth-pop, cinematic string sounds of film-noir, and some spiritual voodoo-like music, as well as elements of blues, industrial, dark wave, orchestral, and post-electronic music. The music is dominated by heavy beats and erupting voice improvisations over a soundscape that is built out of all kinds of noises. In almost every song rhythmically arranged human moans are used. 257

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The overall sound is sexually charged, and when the singing starts it is ecstatic and dramatically performed. The song structures of The Black Soft are based on well-known musical patterns, but in order that sound is to affect us profoundly, it has to become something that is no longer recognizable. The Black Soft does work with clichés as well but they succeed in breaking and destroying them in order to be able to get rid of their cliché functions and thus to create something new and—in their best parts—something unheard, a kind of abstract sound or form where the cliché has been identified, but then has been “deterritorialized,” which renders sonorous forces that are not sonorous, in the sense of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy of creation.3 What becomes sonorous then in The Black Soft’s compositions, is the spasmodic, convulsive rhythm of what I would characterize as a “hystericized” body. The various voices and beats shift, overlap and clash and seem as if they are choking off, or swallowing themselves up. Hereby, staccato, short and hectic beats are not only those generated

Figure 13.1 The Black Soft. Kheraj, Evaan © 2012 All Rights Reserved.

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from the drum computer, but also the moaning forms the soundscape, which seems to almost suffocate. The listener gets viscerally affected and dragged into this convulsing sound body, thus “becoming” it him/ herself. If we were to visualize this convulsing sound body we could compare it to John Carpenter’s science fiction horror movie The Thing (1982) where a parasitic extraterrestrial life form assimilates other organisms and imitates them; a kind of mimicry process takes place where the resulting organism appears like its former organism but differs from it in a hostile extraterrestrial non-human way. The interesting section here is the part where the crew finds this “thing” in the middle of its metamorphoses, before it has completed the full assimilation. What is it precisely at this stage? In Carpenter’s movie the thing undergoing the process looks like a monstrosity, an amalgam of different “hosts,” be it animal or human, a mud-like undefined organism. This moment in which distinct parts intermingle, thus still oscillating between different entities, is the very moment in the horror film out of which the monstrosity is born. It is a monstrosity, but it is also the utopian idea of a new life form, something in between human, animal and alien. And if we omit the horror effect, then it is only a body that is life, where it is not about being a human form or anything else, but where it is only about a living something. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari show how a work of art can come into being, how creative processes can take place, and how this is related to the human body without representing it, but presenting it as a becoming-other that has manifested a bloc of sensations of dehumanized “affects and percepts” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 312–13). In order to describe the parameters that are necessary to create music or art, they mainly refer to the biological theses of Jakob von Uexküll, and present their concepts of “territory” and “refrain,” which they have abstracted from geographically associated sonic motifs of birds. Deleuze and Guattari delineate three examples or processes that together form the territory and refrain. First, a stable point in the midst

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of chaos has to be established: they explicate this idea with the image of a child who is afraid of the dark and sings a song to calm himself, it creates a calm and stable center in the heart of chaos (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 312). As Ronald Bogue explains in Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, this creation serves as “a locus of order in a nondimensional space” (Bogue 2003: 17). In the compositions of The Black Soft, this locus of stability would be a constant beat. The constantly repeating beats serve as a first pulse of what eventually becomes a song that gives a first stabilization or circling around and defining of a ground. In several songs they use liverecorded handclapping, which gives a repetitive first structure without being as artificially static as repeated handclap sounds from a drum machine. Deleuze and Guattari describe periodic repetitions as coded forms that they define as a milieu: “A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a periodic repetition,” but, as they further argue: it is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter . . . . Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition, but each code is a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction. Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or constituted in it. Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 313–14

Already this first grounding of the repetitive beats is not fully metrical, but stems from the pulse of the heartbeat, which makes them irregular, since the heartbeat is always a very new production of the organism, and never the same identical, repetitive beat (Bogue 2003: 18). In this sense the overall beat in the compositions is already true rhythmic patterns that stake out a territory, but they have also become a milieu because they are not metrical. The drum machine beat corresponds to the handclapping, which corresponds to the heartbeat. In a sense they start to communicate with each other and thus have

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vibratory passages in between themselves. This serves as the grounding for a second milieu. A second process that Deleuze and Guattari detect in the structure of the refrain is a process that Ronald Bogue illustrates with the help of an image of a cat that sprays the corners of its house, the trees and bushes in the garden and thereby demarcates a dimensional area that it claims as its possession. Similar to the famous style element of squeaks that Michael Jackson spontaneously built into his flow of rhythm as a recognizable element that marks the “Jackson area” for the listener, The Black Soft “keep their place” by staking out their territory via the constant incorporation of their aforementioned moaning sounds. These are the demarcation of the field that they want to occupy. The rhythmical moaning sounds of the second process correspond to the simultaneously-existing rhythm of constant beats and handclapping of the first process. At this point one could say that two milieus start to communicate with each other—the codes become transcoded. While being in a state of resonance, they open themselves up to chaos; they break the shell of the first establishment of a graspable, repetitious circle and create a space in between two milieus that is not fixed but communicating, reciprocally interacting, even superimposing each other, in a word: vibrating. The periodic repetitions are necessary to form a milieu but the milieu has to have the potential to move to another milieu, and while moving back and forth, oscillating between milieus, a different rhythm is created. As Deleuze and Guattari state, this difference then is what is rhythmical and not the repetition that has created it in the first place (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 314). A transcoding from one milieu to the other takes place because the grounding beat already evokes the moaning sound, which then evokes the melody. Then the third step takes place: in the example of Ronald Bogue, it is “a bird [that] sings an impromptu aria at the break of the day, and thus opens its territory to other milieus and the cosmos at large” (Bogue 2003: 17). The third developing element in The Black Soft’s compositions, then, is when the sound of the voice breaks in and eventually builds the

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melody of a song. But the melody is never completely fulfilled. Most of the time the voice only slightly sketches the melody into the sound structure; with sudden starts and abrupt breaks—often in a hysteric manner, where the voice breaks excessively into pathos and a painful dimension: Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. . . . As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 311

According to Deleuze and Guattari all three processes have to appear simultaneously creating the refrain. The notion of a territory in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy does not mean a closed space and time construct but an open whole, similar to their notion of a work of art. The idea of a territory serves basically to describe the artist’s unique qualities and his distinctive signature, his autonomy. It is just that the artist places a signature on to something in his or her own distinctive way: The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from that, even when it is in the service of war or oppression. Property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. As Lorenz says, coral fish are posters. The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being. Not in a sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to a subject that carries or produces them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode. The signature is not the indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain. Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 316

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Thus we see in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the territory that a certain kind of decoding or deterritorialization must also take place. They explain this openness of the territory in relation to Konrad Lorenz’s observation of the coral fish whose coloration (poster, placard) in their opinion is not fixed to sexual or aggressive stimuli (hormones being responsible for the coloring) but they suggest that its coloring has become expressive rhythm that is related to internal and external components of the territory. The coloring ceases to be functional and transitory but becomes expressive rhythm (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 315–16). Deleuze and Guattari further state that “[a] territory borrows from all milieus; it bites into them, seizes them bodily” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 315). But what the territory takes from milieus—“any milieus: materials, organic products, skin or membrane states, energy sources, action-perception condensates” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 315) ceases to be functional but has to become expressive. If we agree that the pulse of the heartbeat as an organic production appears to become the musical beat sound in the compositions of The Black Soft, and that there must also be many other different kinds of milieus from which The Black Soft “borrowed” their sonic material (such as, for instance, urban noise, inhale-exhale sounds of the body, etc., that start to communicate and build a resonance) one can conclude that these underlying milieus and their rhythm have become expressive (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 315: “Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become expressive”). Due to this process, they attain the territorializing power and autonomy of their distinctive signature. It is important to note that expression does not mean the expression of human emotions in a representative manner. It is not a subjectively created expression of an emotion, of a sexual drive, of a certain kind of mood, etc., that appears as sound and as music. This would only be a cliché expression.4 The moaning sound is a necessity that is both controlled and accidental. It does not express anything, although we can take it as an expressive rhythm in the sense of a signature, the marking of a territory. But as an artistic musical manifestation it ceases here to

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be of personal or subjective quality. By means of deterritorialization, signature becomes style, and style is “figure,” in the sense of JeanFrançois Lyotard5 (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 318). When signature (territory) becomes style or figure, then the experiences of the artist become only the trait of the experience that has transformed into sound and music. This is best explained with the example of Deleuze describing the trait of an animal in a painting by Francis Bacon in The Logic of Sensation. Bacon did not simply illustrate or represent an animal, but the brushstrokes themselves remind one of an animal’s movement. The way Bacon painted the animal is rather the trait of an animal, whereby the animal itself becomes something else rendering visible invisible forces. These forces come into being when animal trait and human body have built a zone of indiscernibility, which starts to intermingle, oscillating between animal trait and human body, thus creating a vibratory passage that one can also call rhythmic (Deleuze 2003: 19–20).6 Similarily, in The Black Soft’s compositions the repetitious moans that shape the structure of the songs remind us immediately of explicit sexual moans. But these moans function very differently from a song like Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby (1975), where the moaning denotes directly its implied action. The Black Soft succeeds in breaking with the cliché, breaking with the simple imitation and representation of this sound. In their case it first has become signature; second, it has become style. It has become their autonomous style element as the moaning becomes a trait of itself. What Deleuze and Guattari call music, and what they assume has the true capacity to enable the listener to join into a process of becomingother, cannot be achieved by imitation, but by the process that enables one to become something else and where this something else becomes purely sonorous: It is no longer a question . . . of imitating a child, even if it is a child who is singing. The musical voice itself becomes-child at the same as the child becomes-sonorous, purely sonorous. No child could ever have done that, or if one did, it would be by becoming in addition something

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other than a child, a child belonging to a different, strangely sensual and celestial, world. In short, the deterritorialization is double: the voice is deterritorialized in a becoming-child but the child it becomes is itself deterritorialized, unengendered becoming. Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 3047

What The Black Soft creates is shaping a sonic body—an ecstatic “living something” rendering audible the tragedy in human existence without describing a human state of being. It is an abstraction of the human condition, a hystericized form, the trait of it that has gotten rid of the human cliché and has become pure sonic figure.

Notes 1 See also Vladimir Jankélévitch: “Music acts upon human beings, on their nervous system . . . . By means of massive irruptions, music takes up residence in our intimate self and seemingly selects to make its home there. The man inhabited and possessed by this intruder, the man robbed of a self, is no longer himself: he has become nothing more than a vibrating string, a sounding pipe” (Jankélévitch 2003: Chapter one). 2 The following references originate from a personal talk with Joseph Topmiller and Chase Coughlin of The Black Soft in April 2013 in New York City. 3 Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of creation is captured throughout their writings, as well as Deleuze’s solo writings. I will refer in particular to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as well as to Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze draws attention to a common “problem” of the arts and refers to Paul Klee: “In art, and in painting as in music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces. For this reason no art is figurative. Paul Klee’s famous formula—‘Not to render the visible, but to render visible’—means nothing else. The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible. Likewise, music attempts to render sonorous forces that are not themselves sonorous” (Deleuze 2003: 48).

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4 See Brian Massumi: “An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized” (Massumi 1996: 221). 5 “Figure” as famously described in Discours, Figure, and as Gilles Deleuze refers to in his work Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, which makes the distinction between the figurative, which is representing the object and therefore is illustrative, and the figure, which is presenting a sensation, which attacks your nervous system directly (see Lyotard 1971, and Deleuze 2003: 5–6). 6 “The deformations the body undergoes are also the animal traits of the head. This has nothing to do with a correspondence between animal forms and facial forms. In fact, the face lost its form by being subjected to the techniques of rubbing and brushing that disorganize it and make a head emerge in its place. The marks or traits of animality are not animal forms but rather the spirits that haunt the wiped-off parts, that pull at the head, individualizing and qualifying the head without the face” (Deleuze 2003: 19). 7 For Deleuze a genuine becoming-other can only be minoritarian, because that is what does not yet have a recognizable voice. The concept of man would be the all too known majoritarian being that has been socially fixed and coded. See also Claire Colebrook: “We need to see the world, Deleuze argues, not as some thing that ‘we’ know through perceptions, but as a plane of impersonal perceptions” (Colebrook 2002: 139–40).

Works cited Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts. London/New York: Routledge. Colebrook, C. (2002), Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D. W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. London: Athlone Press. Electronicfucksonic, 2011. [Song] The Black Soft, The Black Soft. USA : Totu. Jankélévitch, V. (2003), Music and the Ineffable, trans. C. Abbate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Available online: http://press.princeton.edu/ chapters/s7540.pdf. (accessed September 30, 2014). Kheraj, E. (2012) The Black Soft. © 2012 All Rights Reserved. Love to Love You Baby, 1975. [Song] Donna Summer. USA : Oasis. Lyotard, J. (1971), Discours, Figure. Paris: Klincksiek. Massumi, B. (1996), “The Autonomy of Affect,” in P. Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, 217–239. Oxford and Cambridge, MA : Blackwell. Poe, E. A. (1998), The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales. New York: Penguin. The Thing (1982), [Film] Dir. John Carpenter. USA : Universal Pictures.

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Images of Thought | Images of Music Adam Harper

A few years ago I was asked by the Belgian-Dutch magazine Gonzo (circus) to write a new music manifesto to mark the centenary of Luigi Russolo’s essay The Art of Noises, typically regarded as the futurist musical manifesto, and along with the aims of that genre of writing I adopted the bombastic tone of manifestos, hopefully with a tongue recognizable in my cheek and a twinkle in my eye. It began, “We demand the future of music, and a musical future. This is to say we demand new and greater thought, communication, and representation in relation to sound, in relation to each other” (Harper 2013). Demands, futures, greatness. “We.” A little while later I read it out at an event in Philadelphia also marking that centenary, where it was followed by a reading of The Art of Noises by a performance artist in character and dress as the early-twentieth-century futurist, complete with false beard. The resurrected Russolo roared his dreams and frustrations with high camp, bringing out all the absurdity and disquieting violence of his era’s aesthetics to much audience laughter. With the shades of Charlie Chaplin’s character in The Great Dictator recalling the association of futurism with fascism, this was not just the text of a manifesto but the image of one, and it was something distanced, historicized, and palpably ironic. What might a manifesto for new music look like today, after the many failed dogmas of the twentieth century and the violence with which they are tainted? What fresh departure could such a call possibly make from a contemporary cultural milieu in which everything is (allegedly) possible, especially those departures made in the past? Such broad and tendentious proposals, particularly in the English-speaking 269

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world, not only appear ridiculous but dangerously blinkered or universalizing. Yet we live in a world—there’s that “we” again—that once again incites the imagination and makes a list of demands. Once again we have begun to dip our toes into a new, challenging and dangerous century, with new formations of collective subjectivity both necessary and emergent. A newly political musicology, animated by continental philosophy, has already begun to reject neoliberal postmodernism’s “end of history,” reconsidering some of the tenets of modernism in the process (e.g. Harper-Scott 2012; Currie 2012; Shank 2014). Music is called upon for its ability to philosophize and imagine new and better futures. In a bid to avoid the excessively prescriptive or assumptive nature of past manifestos, my Gonzo (circus) text focused more on critique of existing and naturalized structures within music-making than offering any concerted specification of tomorrow or any one particular set of ideas about the musical future. It hoped to dissolve music’s traditional ontologies in increasingly radical steps, moving from melody to harmony, rhythm, the work, the performance, the style, the instrument, the composer, the audience, and finally to “music” itself. Its main assumption was the direct equation of music with thought. The manifesto began with music obliquely defined as the sending of information relative to sound and society: “new and greater thought, communication, and representation in relation to sound, in relation to each other.” “Communication” and “representation” might also be considered types of thought, of the passing on and processing of information—different semantic facets of the same activity. Later, I elaborated on this processing of information and its political character: It often appears that music is a form of entertainment, but it is one of our species’ most important modes of communication. In the way it sounds and the way it is performed, it represents us all, our feelings, identities and desires. Music is a vote that all too frequently goes uncounted. It is a thought passing along the neural net formed by our entire planet.

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The manifesto’s final sentence offered one of its few actual predictions, again, oblique: “Music and the world and life will leave their cages, the ear will return to the brain, and there will only be the movement of information in thought.” Alluding to the poetics of John Cage, this implied the dissolution of any distinction between music and nonmusic and between the creation or perception of music and the wider activity of information (neural or otherwise) of which it is a part and with which it is continuous. Such a broad assumption of music’s ontology upholds, in the extreme, the ideal of open-mindedness that composing and listening to new music requires. It was also the central assumption of the book I had written before the manifesto, Infinite Music (Harper 2011). Although in many ways dressed as a manifesto and calling for a revival of the spirit of modernism, the substance of the book was its highly flexible, relativistic account of what constitutes music and musical forms. Following the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and much of the work he did with Félix Guattari, it was only musical difference, or change, itself that could be counted on as the one permanent characteristic of music up and down the ages, in the distant past and distant future. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) equates true thought with difference in itself, and in parallel it is difference that is the deepest fact about music, once all the lesser, impermanent specifics, ideas, and techniques—the manifestos—are stripped away. If music is to be philosophy, this musical difference is none other than thought itself. Whatever the word or concept of “music” means a millennium from now, whatever its significance, making any claims other than that it will involve difference and thought would reduce it to a finite concept. Whatever specifics there might be about music in the future, the one thing we can be sure about is that it will involve or be involved in “the movement of information in thought,” whether this event happens within a human mind, between two or more human bodies, or, more likely perhaps, between a multiplicity of nodes that we today might not immediately recognize as “human.” Of course, this “thought” is by no means exclusive to music. Nor is thought somehow exclusively musical. But defining music as a discrete

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concept with necessary and sufficient conditions for being is besides the point. Music is continuous with other art forms such as dance, art, film, and gaming, even with life itself. Thought flows through all of these things without showing a passport or going through customs. Indeed, like thought, the domain of music is no more or less than the domain of the entire universe. This is the end of the road that John Cage reached when he would say “everything we do is music.” This is also the univocity of Deleuze’s philosophy, his and Guattari’s plane of immanence, Spinoza’s God, even. Definitions of music or musical activity, or “musicking”—the use of music as a verb that Christopher Small popularized and that crucially encompasses both composing and listening as well as everything else (Small 1998)—melts away into all of its super-categories, becomes infinite and, technically at least, useless. On a more practical basis, particular definitions and aesthetics of music and its subcategories do and will emerge, but hopefully provisionally, against the backdrop of infinite difference, to fulfill particular sociopolitical purposes (or not) just as thoughts do. Mindfulness of this backdrop, returning to it in moments that demand musicking and philosophizing, improves the potential richness and utility of these musics and these thoughts. In any case, there is a distinction, then, between particular “thoughts” and thought itself, between particular instances of or objects in musicking and musicking as possibility. Again, this lies in parallel with Deleuze’s account of philosophy. His concept of The Image of Thought represents a particular set of ideas about the properties of thinking—its relationship to truth, its end of recognition, its morality and so on—that reappears throughout the history of Western philosophy. True thought and philosophy questions and transcends that image: As a result [of Nietzsche’s critique of philosophy] the conditions of a philosophy which would be without any kind of presuppositions appear all the more clearly: instead of being supported by the moral Image of thought, it would take as its point of departure a radical critique of this Image and the “postulates” it implies. It would find its difference or its true beginning, not in agreement with the pre-philosophical Image but

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in a rigorous struggle against this Image, which it would denounce as non-philosophical. As a result, it would discover its authentic repetition in a thought without Image . . . as though thought could begin to think, and continually begin again, only when liberated from the Image and its postulates. It is futile to claim to reformulate the doctrine of truth without first taking stock of the postulates which project this distorting image of thought. Deleuze 1994: 167–8

We can similarly talk of an Image of Music, against which a music “without any kind of presuppositions” would struggle, “as though [music] could begin to [music], and continually begin again.” What might the “postulates” of this Image of Music be? One of them is the aforementioned “music [as] a form of entertainment.” But certainly, the strongest one defines a certain relationship to sound, specifically, that music is sound(s), is sound(s) primarily, and even is sound(s) only. The composer and theorist Edgard Varèse famously called his own work “organized sound,” and this has persisted as the broadest definition—and indeed aesthetic—of music (Varèse and Wenchung 1966: 18). Firstly, the “organized” nature of this music presupposes an active agency (human or otherwise) behind the making of sound(s), and might even imply a kind of order within it. We might say that neither is necessary for an experience of musical thought, and following Deleuze, we can radically critique this image of order as “non-musical.” It could be precisely in its disorganized and disruptive nature that true music and thought becomes possible. Secondly, music is widely considered an inherently and primarily sonic medium, rather than one that simply relates to sound. Moreover, for many composers and critics, sound is often held to be a more progressive category than music; music is seen as a less relevant subcategory of the more modern, more direct world of sound, one that often somehow circumvents the apparently corrupting mediation of culture and traditional musical technocracy (such as classical or industrial establishments). But sound is by no means a larger, more essential category than music. It could be seen the other way around,

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with sound as a subcategory of music, or at the very least, sound and music overlapping with neither subsuming the other. I have used the word “sonocentric” to describe both this privileging of sound and the reduction of music to sound or to plural definite or indefinite article sounds (Harper 2012: 33). It is wrong to apparently deny that music has a significant non-sonic dimension. Visual art, dance, and costume is a major part of music and this should be acknowledged both in terms of creativity and aesthetics. This is obviously true in popular music cultures, but is equally true outside them. Even when we try to pretend otherwise, music—and sound itself, too—is a multimedia event with purposes and effects that extend beyond sound. Sonifying music makes it discrete from the nonsonic. This is another area where the exclusivity of standard definitions of music begins to dissolve. Thinking of music in terms of sound(s) also makes it sonically determined and internally discretized, something composed of a specific sound or a collection of specific sounds, of sonic objects that can have fixed and recognizable identities. Owing to the semantic leakage between “sound” and “timbre,” sonocentrism can all too easily collapse music’s multidimensional differences into those of determined timbres. For example, a rhythm such as one might read from notation can be ontologically independent of specific “sounds”—it is a musical object that cannot be reduced to a sonic object, or an object made of determinate sound or sounds. Granted, it cannot be manifested without sounds at the point of performance, but its identity and ontology as an object is not inherently a definite or determined timbral identity. It is more deeply representative of the possibilities of music to begin with the idea of difference and change, before these patterns coalesce into sonic “objects” for either composer or listener. Rather than sonic objects, these differences can be specified as particular variables constrained to particular values or ranges of values. Most famously, in music these variables are pitch, volume, timbre, and duration or time, with values such as 440Hz, 23dB, five seconds, or sine wave respectively. There are, however, many more variables that can be

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considered in the creation and aesthetics of music, involving space, aspects of listening, non-sonic variables and complex categories such as rhythm, harmony, and melody (in fact, in some cases there are only two variables—amplitude of a sound wave and time). It is collections of these variables and values, irrespective of sound, that form subcategories of music as a whole, musical objects. This is where musical difference becomes information and indeed, thought, since a constrained variable constitutes a piece of information. But it would be wrong to consider this information absolutely or objectively derived. Rather, it is generated by thought, with music and thought reciprocally constituting one another. It is through a socially, culturally, and psychologically mediated musicking that musical objects become subjectively and provisionally generated patterns or spaces of information, that is to say, thoughts. Philosophy conforms to an Image of Thought in the same way, and thus music conforms an Image of Music. In fact, just as we can talk about musical objects as subcategories of music, so we can talk about images of music without capital letters and in the plural, as mediated versions of particular musical objects. We could talk of images of melody, of the piano, of jazz, or of particular musicians, even of images of musical novelty itself. Every instance of musicking, as well as musical objects away from performance strictly defined, generates an image of music: an idea about and perception of its difference and repetition, both internal to the musicking and between musickings. Composing, performing, and listening are ultimately the same activity: the constituting of images of music, and they regulate and are regulated by aesthetic responses. They discriminate between all the potential pieces of information musicking can offer a listener and come to constitute a particular informational structure or subset of features, effectively presented to them as a structure of constrained variables. This process will only constitute some variables, values and musical objects while the rest will be discounted, effectively undetected, or allotted a more peripheral status. It affects our assumptions, opinions and expectations about what we think make up certain musical objects away from actual musical

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performances. Images of music are musical objects as they appear in the mind or between minds, that is, in culture: they are “imaginations” of music. They comprise internal and external differentiations, orderings of perceptions, aesthetic priorities, assumptions and expectations. Without images of music, all we encounter are disorganized sounds—actually, without the information processing capabilities that create these images for us, our brains would not really be functioning at all. Images of music delimit what is thinkable as music, and, most importantly, thinkable through music. They can have a detrimental effect on the ability to appreciate and even imagine music that does not fit to their templates. Just as in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, what lies outside of them is cast as disruptive and apparently irrational, and often labeled “noise.” An inability or unwillingness to observe and comply with the implicit images regulating the perception and aesthetics of art and life in general is often classified as madness or put down to limited or altered mental capacity, or simply suffers from a lack of cultural capital. Like thought, musical creativity works and is perceived in relation to these images of music and their blind spots, and when it manages to expand or supersede them it could be considered genuinely new, “modernist” perhaps. This musical creativity is not just the preserve of those areas of music-making considered traditionally creative (composition, improvisation and performance), but since all musicking generates and can potentially expand images, it is also something possible through music criticism, critical listening and repeat performance. It is only half the struggle, then, for composers to compose new music. Listening equates to composing in that both activities constitute musical thought, so without an appropriate way of listening— an appropriately adapted image of music—new music will not appear new, viable, or recognizable at all. New music demands new ways of listening. Indeed, the dichotomy is largely false because the two activities both constitute music: new music is new listening, and new listening is new music, even if it is “old” music with a fresh perspective.

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The notion of an infinitely variable music-without-images can be seen as both the destination and the source of a modernist musicking, one that truly equates to thought. It cannot actually be manifested, since images are unavoidable if any information is to be gleaned from or through music at all. Yet musicking can hint at it, striving for richer images of music, images more suited to modern capacities and challenges. This process is achieved through, or at the very least in metaphorical parallel with, the development and usage of modern technologies and scientific discovery, and reflects modernity. Modernity is constantly “beyond” images and as such necessitates the creation of new images that better reflect the changed possibilities and structures of the modern world. As with Deleuze’s Image of Thought, so with the sonocentric Image of Music, which all too readily associates what are limited images of music with an objective, sonified truth of discrete objects, thus listening with a minimum, or absence, of difference or thought. Musicking is not an encounter with these objects, but their ontological disruption, still less is it authenticated by some disavowal of the mediation of culture, “musical” or otherwise, by the bracketing off of life and the non-sonic in a realist search for sound-objects in themselves. It should be a continuous meditation on pure difference, before or instead of its division into sound and sounds. Music and listening should not be a museum full of given sonic objects, but a seething quantum foam that could give birth to a new dimension at any second. True listening, and true composing as well perhaps, is in not knowing what, or not knowing yet what sounds are or might be present, but nevertheless sensing change and the potential for change. This, one hopes, is modernist sound in the twenty-first century. It is not a sound. Ultimately, it is the equation of music with thought that justifies the project of new music, of musical difference. If music and the world is in constant, continuous change, and needs to resist and replace limited, outmoded images of itself over any given time period, then music and thought alike should be at their most receptive to difference. We can endlessly pass images of music and of the world along the neural net

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unthinkingly, even images of new music with or without costume and manifesto in hand, or we can hope to improve and think anew. If music and thought are not just the purely aesthetic flickering of the mind but the sending of new information across neurons and across cultures and any living system, a technology of self (DeNora 2000) and of society, then we do not have to argue that music can be called upon to improve ourselves and our world simply because it provides fresh metaphors for it. Whatever its relation to sound, music is the very thinking of the world itself and of us as ourselves—it is not just us that creates music, it is also music that creates us. I close, then, with the words of the composer Peter Ablinger: “Die Klänge sind nicht die Klänge! Sie sind da, um den Intellekt abzulenken und die Sinne zu besänftigen. Nicht einmal das Hören ist das Hören: Das Hören ist das, was mich selbst erschafft” (Ablinger 2002). “Sounds are not sounds! They are here to distract the intellect and to soothe the senses. Not once is hearing ‘hearing’: hearing is that which creates me.”

Works cited Ablinger, P. (2002), Peter Ablinger website. Available online: http://ablinger. mur.at/ (accessed October 2, 2015). Currie, J. R. (2012), Music and the Politics of Negation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994 [1968]), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. London: Continuum. DeNora, T. (2000), “Music as a Technology of Self,” in Music in Everyday Life, 46–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harper, A. (2011), Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making. Winchester, UK : Zero Books. Harper, A. (2013), “A New Manifesto for New Music”, Gonzo (circus), January 11. Available online: http://www.gonzocircus.com/a-new-manifesto-fornew-music/ (accessed October 2, 2015). Harper-Scott, J. P. E. (2012), The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction and William Walton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Russolo, L. (1986), The Art of Noises, trans. B. Brown. New York: Pendragon. Shank, B. (2014), The Political Force of Musical Beauty. Durham: Duke University Press. Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover: University Press of New England. Varèse, E. and C. Wen-chung (1966), “The Liberation of Sound,” in Perspectives of New Music 5(1) (Autumn–Winter): 11–19.

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Digital Sound, Thought Aden Evens

Sound and event An event is not a thing but a happening, something that unspools or streams. Events occur as part of and in the midst of other events, a ball of tangled string. What distinguishes an event is that it distinguishes itself, stands out from the flow, an eddy in the stream, a knot of fibrous threads. These are not images of discontinuity but of singularity; the eddy remains part of the stream’s flow, and a knot in a tree still conveys nutrients from roots to leaves and back. Though it stands apart, an event coalesces from out of its milieu, drawing itself together in strands of matter, motion, and thought. The event fits its context, bearing rich relations to antecedences and consequences, but it also stands over that context, asserting a coherence that exceeds its milieu. It arises as though already there, as though it had been waiting for the contingent alignment of its proper conditions. The event is determined as a resonance among numerous factors, a crossed threshold of imbalance that reconfigures its milieu. As it unwinds, the event coaxes or prods, calls to action or attention. Could we call this motion thought? Thought or not, sound is always motion. To produce sound, to induce a vibration in some medium, requires an initial displacement. Something has to move from one place to another, and often back again, to induce a motion, an oscillation in the air (or other medium). The question is where this motion comes from, and where it goes. Thought sound is a motion of thought and sound; thought sound thinks. Or, thought sound is on the order of an event. It stands apart from but also carries with it its milieu, including its impetus and its potential, where it 281

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comes from and where it is going. To hear sound is to hear a motion, a motion of stories and promises, implications and expressions. That there is no sound without motion establishes the priority of motion in sound. One hears first of all motion, displacement over time, oscillating air pressure serving as a medium of expression. Generated by displacement, sound carries that displacement with it; one hears spatial transposition and so hears in a sound that sound’s generation. Thought sound bears in its material the sono-spatial context of its propagation. A sound originating farther away typically has less high frequency content, as the short wavelengths of higher frequencies are more readily disrupted and absorbed by intervening surfaces. (Thus do mountain echoes have a hollow sonority: robbed of some high frequency content, their spectra emphasize mid-range and lower frequencies.) It is not only, therefore, the consequences of a sound on its environment that constitute thought in sound but the effects of the environment on the sound. Even as it carries its origins with it, sound announces its destiny; its oscillations, a wave of rising and falling air pressure, make patterns, detectable as pitch, timbre, volume, duration, and other sonic phenomena, within and beyond thresholds of human perception. Compression of the air anticipates the subsequent rarefaction and vice versa; strung together, these oscillations establish larger patterns, creating and then resolving tensions heard as harmony, rhythm, vowel, and consonant. Of course this describes much music, especially Western music, but it holds true of any sound. Sound already announces where it is going, it promises its eventuality, holding—as implicated, not represented—the noise energy that will be drawn out and inflected to become thought. Sound’s future also is its accidents, but accident in dialectical negotiation with the ideal or absolute: the implicated exists as a set of tensions, however harmonious, among the different frequency components of sound, which will draw noise into order to establish other tensions. The future of sound is heard in its tensions, that never fully resolve but only create more and less sympathetic resonance.

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Thought is satisfied, for a time, when sound offers the least tension, an octave or a sine wave, but even there lurks the next sound. Applause wipes away a tension too fully resolved, replacing it with a noise packed full of sonic energies at all frequencies, a sound that contains all the others; but the closer sound comes to noise, the less articulate it becomes, giving up pitch, rhythm, and timbre to approach that universal sound of noise. To move from a vibration to a description of that vibration is to move in the direction of abstraction. Thought sound is an event, its motion happens over time, but time is nowhere represented in the sequence of numbers that constitute digital sound. Time gets siphoned off, removed during the distillation process that generates a digital representation of sound. It must be restored, added back in, when that representation once again becomes a hearable sound. In the standard case (for there are different ways of representing sound in the digital), the next number in the sequence is understood to represent the amplitude of the signal (or the pressure differential of the air) at the next tick of a digital clock. The clock, independent of the sequence of numbers representing any particular sound, determines how quickly to read through the list of numbers, and this sample rate is essential to the pitch of the generated sound. In this sense, pitch, too, is abstracted in digital representation, it becomes an assumption about the digital clock used to play back the sound.1 Stripped of its motion and its concrete relation to time, digital sound—if that refers to a representation of sound comprising a sequence of numbers—is not heard, at least not while it is digital. Made of bits, a digital representation of sound is discrete and precise: a list of integers representing the oscillating amplitude of a wave.2 What does a sequence of integers sound like? This sequence of numbers representing the rise and fall of a wave can be used to generate an electrical signal that rises and falls analogously, which in turn drives speakers that oscillate to generate at the surface of the speaker a variation in air pressure over time still analogous to the “wave” of integers. As this variation of air pressure over time moves through space away from the

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speaker and induces vibrations in an organ of hearing, say a tympanum, it can be heard; but then it is no longer discrete and precise, no longer digital. We might take the term digital sound in a broader sense: to hear a digital sound would mean to hear a sound generated from or through a digital code. How, if at all, does digital representation affect sound, and how does it affect sound thinking? Abstracting motion by encoding it as a sequence of numbers renders all sound in a common form, separates sound from its evental origin. Or perhaps the digital provides its own event of sonic production, ties sound to a digital origin and a generic (or numeric?) motion. How does digital content, a sequence of numbers that represent sound, become digital expression, sound heard or, possibly, sound thought?

The digital stratum In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) imagine a performance by Professor Challenger, whose “dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program for pure computers” (57). The lecture ranges widely across fields, provoking much of the audience to walk out, but it appeals recurrently to a discourse about strata or layers, describing stratified organizations of parts of the world, where each stratum exhibits particular relationships among content and expression, form and substance. Strata “consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar aggregates” (40). At Deleuze and Guattari’s invitation, consider the topology of the digital stratum.3 Notably, the digital is bipolar. With abstraction as its chief technique and the bit as its central technology, the digital sets aside or defers generative difference in favor of the simple, abstract difference between 0 and 1, making the same difference—0 or 1—out of all difference. At this pole, the digital becomes

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a flat plane of equivocation, a pointillist sea of bits, the Ecumenon. Were this plane the only tendency of the digital, it would never come to mean anything, for meaning implies a difference beyond formality. The other pole of the digital connects this plane of equivocation with its outside, reaching toward the world in a sequence of discrete steps, stacked planes in analytic relations; we designate this expansive pole using the expression, n+1. The formula n+1, the increment, is not a fixed topological structure but a model for supplementation, an instruction to take a step (back); its form indicates an operation, a process rather than a stasis. The unit included in this formula signals its discreteness, while the heterogeneity of the addends points toward the implicit hierarchy of n+1: it is not a matter simply of adding one more of the same, but of dimensional augmentation, a leap up rather than a slide over. These two poles of digital topology, an inhibition and an expansion, themselves make no binary. The flat plane and the power to add a layer, these poles work across their difference to establish the digital’s power and define its limits. At its expansive pole, the digital always refers to some outside, for it never determines its own meaning through automated algorithm, but awaits its encounter with difference. The outside steps in to keep the digital from collapsing into an empty formalism. Even the materiality of the digital is on its outside, a parastratum, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, an associated milieu in which the ideal digital becomes actual material. The digital is material abstraction, an ideal made actual without foregoing its ideality. Rendering its materiality on its outside, constituted of abstraction, the digital exposes all of its inside at once, a random access at every scale. The digital employs numerous (if standardized) materials, but largely subordinates them to its equivocal abstraction, sidestepping material resistance to offer the untroubled flow of logic and its willing submission to any structure, any logical instruction. Topologically, the digital is made of sequences of bits, but instead of hiding in sequence, every bit is within reach, exposed to the outside, to constitute an organization one might call hyperlinear.

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Both polarities, equivocation and increment, advance by processes of abstraction, which names the most general power of the digital, its technique. In the service of abstraction, the bit is the central technology of the digital. There are three vectors of abstraction that support each other to organize the digital, and each draws on a different aspect of the bit. A reductive abstraction makes of all difference a discrete, numerical difference, a sequence of 0s and 1s. To abstract is to set aside difference, to substitute an idea for something concrete. Stripped of generative difference, submitted to an ideal logic, the binary code returns to an equivocal condition, the Ecumenon, a plane flattened and without texture. With no productive difference of its own, the bit can lend itself to any information, all facets of the world capturable in posits, whatever can be true or false. Reductive abstraction powers the digital’s universality, rendering digital code maximally generic. A second vector of abstraction, deductive abstraction, is the digital’s most familiar face. Deductive abstraction generates bits from bits by a formal logic. Deduction closes the gap between input and output, enforcing the inevitability of the axiomatic conclusion on the basis of the given premises; all results become predetermined and time is counted in steps rather than duration. Everything in the digital happens according to this deductive logic. Deduction names the flow of logic after reduction has done its work, an operation within a purely formal domain; whereas reduction begins from contentual elements and induction reaches back toward the actual world, deduction purchases its perfect and smooth operation only by confining itself to the plane of equivocation. It cannot accommodate content, for deduction works only outside of contingency and accident, seizes only the abstract part of its objects. This separation from the world of content allows the digital to operate independently and without resistance, but its distance from accident establishes this domain as one of pure possibility. All of the calculations have been laid out on the Ecumenon, every pathway already implicit in its practical availability, as deduction ensures that every conclusion is foregone. Potential, the term for a creative future, finds no purchase on this equivocal plane, as deduction moves

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inexorably and without hesitation from bit to bit. Deduction offers to the digital the power of automation, the ability to move in discrete steps within its positivist world of bits. Running counter to the equivocation of 0 and 1, the inductive abstraction pushes toward the other pole, n+1, advancing by sectioning planes in discrete increments; n+1 adds a dimension, takes a step toward an outside, a view from above that takes in many discrete individuals together, organizing them in groups with structures. This abstraction is inductive because it brings different parts together into an abstract coherence, a gathering of cases performed from without, and thus having no internal reason, only an external determination, control from the next level up. Groups are thus induced on the plane of equivocation, outlined by a shadow from above. This view from above is the first meaning of plus-one, an invitation to bring the user to the party, an opening to the outside. Reuniting the pure, formal, equivocal logic of the Ecumenon with an outside that provides an expressed content to go with the digital’s form, inductive abstraction gives the digital its power of simulation. Three vectors of abstraction, based in the bit, afford the digital a universal code, drained of meaning, operating autonomously, and reaching toward its outside by its power of simulation. These abstractions reach far enough to instantiate within the material world an ideal, the ideal form of a bit. The bit is an abstraction captured in a material substrate, an entity equal to its idea even as it operates in the real world. Engineering the bit to read and write 0 or 1 exactly, the digital drives a wedge between the bit’s material and its behavior, assigning all resistance and fuzziness to the material side so as to maintain the ideal side in its abstract perfection. The bit’s submission to logic offers no ambiguity, no resistance, as though ignoring the inertial drag typical of materiality.4 One might imagine that the Ecumenon, built out of bits, is anything but equivocal. After all, the difference between 0 and 1 could not be more stark; surely this is a difference that makes a difference. But in fact the two values of a bit—conventionally called 0 and 1 but largely

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unrelated to the numbers that go by those same names—are practically equivalent. As the names of bit values, 0 and 1 have no meanings of their own, for they signify only their formal distinction: 0-and-not-1 or 1-and-not-0. The abstraction of the bit, evacuated of all meaning except a formal distinction, renders the two values equivocal, each nothing but its difference from the other. But this extreme of abstraction also offers the digital its extraordinary reach and power, its function as a universal code language. The bit can assert its binarity universally only because it has been drained of its own difference: 0 and 1 mean nothing in themselves, nothing in particular. They are placeholders for a meaning still to be assigned. In fact this minimal definition of the bit needs already to be amended in light of the equivocation of bit values. For it is not just that a 0 is not a 1 and a 1 is not a 0; these values take their meanings in part because, wholly equivocal, they could have been their others. Instead of 0-andnot-1, the bit is 0-but-might-have-been-1. Which is to say that the bit asserts its empty formal meaning as a posit and a possibility. And this possibility at the foundation of the equivocal bit lends to the digital its distinctive modality, thrusting the digital into a realm of possibility. Bits eventually come to mean something only in relation to the idea that they might have meant the other thing, a Sausserian principle applied to a simple discrete distinction. Because the bit—even as material actuality, say a tiny spot that induces a magnetic field around it—has no particular meaning, no prejudice, it remains abstract. It is not only the idea of a bit that is abstract or conceptual, but also the operative, materialized bit as it flows through machines and diffuses throughout the electromagnetic aura in which we live. Its wireless instantiation exemplifies the complementarity between the bit’s design and its power of abstraction. In the history of digital technologies, material has been stripped away, resistance ameliorated, to allow the smoothest, fastest, most consistent, most ubiquitous flow of bits. Progressive dematerialization, though never entire, allows the bit to exist as actual without abandoning its ideality. In the real world, in digital machines, the bit behaves as its own idea, a

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perfect simulacrum of itself, a pure form substantiated. Materially reduced to a nearly frictionless conveyor belt of logical values, the digital offers a world rarefied through abstraction, a domain stripped to an empty representation of nothing but structure, the austerity of 0s and 1s without character and without will. The digital is materialized abstraction.5 The discreteness of bits exhibits plainly the meaning of the digital as material abstraction. Every bit, not just in principle but in fact, is exactly one or the other value, and every bit is wholly distinct from every other; discretization institutes another dimension of ideality. To develop instruments sufficiently refined and durable to keep bits from blurring into each other is an essential contribution to digital substance.6 And to develop mechanisms that simulate the bit’s discrete values by treating a continuous interval as an exact determination, this too is a founding moment of digital technology.7 Thus when space and time, the bit’s materiality, cease to follow their controllable, predictable, normal course and blur these discrete distinctions at the core of digital actualization, this de-idealization typically produces not an interesting moment of creative unpredictability but simply a systemwide unraveling, for the whole system relies on discreteness. A digital computer that cannot distinguish consistently between 0 and 1 or between one bit and another is a computer that will not compute. The bit pulls back from its material substrate, its logic working the same regardless of what material it occupies. The material arrives as though from outside the bit, which huddles around its formalism. The abstraction that produces bits, subtracting difference from the actual to render equivocal, constitutes the digital’s interiority as a domain of idealization. Indifferent to its material, its only allegiance to logic, the digital makes possible a treatment of its interior as a pure logic. The difference in the digital between form and substance is thus a matter of logic versus electricity, an ideal versus an invisible real. This is not idle philosophizing: the extreme abstraction of the digital founds its extraordinary abilities, its extensive reach, its unimaginable speed and scale, its agnostic availability for any simulation whatsoever. Stripped of

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any lingering meaning of its own and divorced from the material that would weigh it down or lend it a character, the digital is so effective because it is neuter and without resistance, the very form of instrumentalization. As the engine of the digital, the bit expresses the digital’s divergent polarities. Its reductive abstraction drains it of all meaning and strips away material resistance, to allow an easy flow of logic across a plane of formal difference, the Ecumenon. At the other pole, the bit underpins the inductive abstraction, retaining in its distinction between 0 and 1 a sliver of asymmetry, a moment of difference that exceeds formal distinction.8 True, each value has no meaning but to refer to the other as its negative definition, in which sense the two values are the same. There is a remainder, however: the two values are the same in their symmetrical equivalence, but their difference is not the same difference. The binary operates not just by marking a discrete, formal distinction within a bit between 0 and 1 but also by maintaining this distinction across a vast plane of sequenced 0s and 1s. A 0 (for example) is equal to itself, but also equal to another 0, such that all 0s are similarly distinct from all 1s. Each bit therefore contains an internal distinction of value, but also an external distinction of place, an index that identifies and distinguishes it from other bits. This formal posit, a part of the bit that asserts its generic uniqueness, evinces not the indifference of the Ecumenon, but an increment, n+1, a step toward the outside. That it bears a relation to values outside of it, a perspective from which to recognize the same 0 in two different instances, this references another dimension, a beyond.9 Both differences in the bit, its internal distinction of value, and its external distinction of place, remain formal or abstract, pending a meaning that will only arrive from without. Bits flatten and bits increment, which capacities establish the planar topology, stacked planes related through homology. This nested hierarchy of layers by which the digital reaches toward its outside begins in the split or cracked binarity of the bit, which at the heart of its equivocation holds the seed of generative difference. The difference between 0 and 1 remains an internal, indifferent difference. But the

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consistent identification of 0s and 1s across an equivocal plane, this is a difference that refers to an outside of the bit, a difference among bits, that identifies a bit as occupying one place in a sequence and not another.10 A distinction of value and a distinction of place, these two differences constitute the operational bit. This is to say that the digital’s means of treating a group as a unit, of regarding something as a whole, is via its power of dimensional incrementing, n+1. The digital takes a group of bits as a whole by viewing them from above, as it were, or by simulating a view from above. The view from above, the collection of bits, is already there on the plane of equivocation, built into the logic that governs the on-and-off blinking of bits as they retain or reassign their values according to logical demands inscribed in the structures of electrical circuitry on the surface of a chip or circuit board. The Ecumenon already outlines in its flows of binary logic the shadows of higher planes that float above it, reaching toward its outside,11 as if Edwin Abbott’s geometrical characters in Flatland could describe themselves as seen from above. Basing its operation on the moment of generative difference within the bit, n+1 is a model of dimensional augmentation evident throughout the digital milieu. It stamps the digital’s relationship to time, describing the halting progress of the computer as a discrete state machine, in which instructions are processed one tick of the clock at a time; each discrete state already implies the subsequent one, such that the digital consists of a present state and a next state, n+1. On a grander scale, n+1 describes the digital’s relation to futurity, its association, dating to the earliest computers, with images of what is to come, its promise always to offer something more, something even better, a new version, an update, the echo of our age that answers digital at every announcement of the future. From the perspective of a working coder, n+1 further marks the discrete steps by which source code is tokenized, precompiled, compiled, assembled, and linked to become machine code, the layers or stages that seem to be the rule of digital construction. Describing the protocols that normalize and regulate internet communication, Alexander Galloway invokes numerous layerings,

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structures within structures within structures, seemingly endless zooms out. Bits find their meanings, reach toward the world in discrete intervals, producing layers that define a space between digital and actual. The bit, as dematerialized ideal, offers no difference, and so lies in a plane of bits without texture, a hyperlinear sequence of random access bits.12 Reaching toward its outside, the digital accumulates its forms on another plane, hovering over the Ecumenon. Still made of bits, this epistratum groups bits together, casting shadows, abstract forms on the plane of equivocation.13 Bytes, words, variables, numbers, symbols— perhaps each of these terms defines its own plane, closely stacked sheets that make a sheaf of formal planes—discrete groupings of bits on one epistratum become grouped elements on still higher ones, data structures, algorithms, code libraries, applications, menus, icons, objects. In discrete steps, the digital moves away from the plane of equivocation toward its outside, each higher plane organizing the structures that lie below it. High-level programming languages are so called because they allow the specification of many bits in nested structures, a perspective farther from the bit plane and closer to the actual world. The digital’s means of reaching beyond the plane of bits do not violate its ecumenical constraint. For the digital meets its outside not immediately but by a power of induction that produces the digital as simulation. The digital does not, for instance, treat at once a grouping or collection of bits, but always proceeds one bit at a time according to a relentlessly sequential logic. Because bits are equivocal, a group of bits does not find its reason in those bits, but always answers to an external determination that performs a grouping operation; groups are made using a cookie-cutter logic. The digital simulates its reach toward the outside using iterative techniques, which process a group of bits in succession to cover a whole field, and it abbreviates such ramified actions in its code. Digital encoding is itself a dimensional Aufhebung, a way of encapsulating a logic of multiple steps into a single lexical or logical unit. To take a particularly concrete example, the letter k might be described (from the computer’s perspective) as a table of bits, in

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which each bit in the table is either on or off. This description still takes the table as a whole entity, as though it could be surveyed at once by the computer, but to work with this table the digital processes its individual cells (bits) one by one, iterating over a sequence. (Think, for instance, of algorithms, repeating sequentially in nested loops.) At the threshold dividing inside from outside, the digital relaxes its rule of discrete abstraction to meet what is not (or not altogether) digital: the user and her world of accident and affect. But even before any key is pressed or button clicked, the machine has already assigned content to the forms of digital abstraction. The parastratum that hosts this encounter of form and content, the interface, makes shapes, sounds, and colors, menus, windows, and icons out of the (equivocal) values and structures defining the tiered planes of digital abstraction.14 Being an interface, the interface faces two directions, a surface of encounter with one side turned to the Ecumenon and one turned to the outside. It is a privileged plane of encounter, a notable divide between inside and out. But according to the rule of the increment, the well remarked human-machine interface is not singular but is foremost among many; the digital generates multiple discrete surfaces, each of which establishes inside and outside according to its particular faces, to make steps in a logical traverse, a halting journey between the machine and the user. We could say that the digital is made of interfacial planes, surfaces each facing two directions without symmetry.15 Take the epistratum that hovers closest to the plane of bits. On its out-facing side it gathers sequenced bits from the Ecumenon below it into groups of eight, organizing bits into bytes that allow a ready treatment of eight sequenced bits as a provisional unit. These simple structures are established independently of the values of their particular bits; as a structure, the byte is indifferent to its value. Facing in, this plane reflects the value of each discrete bit, filling in the eight-bit byte, inscribed in outline on its flip side, with one of 256 possible values, every combination of 0s and 1s that can be made with eight bits in sequence. The digital is stretched across many such planes, related in a succession of homologies from

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plane to plane, from a stream of 0s and 1s, to a stream of bytes, to a datum or command, to a data structure or sub-subroutine, to a collection of data structures or an algorithm, to an object: at each junction an interface, each step instituting a further abstraction, which subsumes and partially hides the smaller units within it.16 The isomorphism that obtains from plane to plane is a power of organization, to induce, via rules of simple logic, groupings and orderings of the discrete objects from the plane below. Though objects are constructed using the discrete parts from lower planes of organization, the structure itself comes from without, the next higher plane, but at the same time it is already there on the Ecumenon. The logical determinations that establish a layer of digital organization are themselves encoded in the bits of the plane of equivocation. As a universal code, the digital does not distinguish between data and instruction; it is all 0s and 1s, all on the same plane. Form of form (structure) and form of content (value) become just form at this extreme of abstraction. The inductive abstraction that gathers discrete parts into larger objects relies on the deductive abstraction, the rule of the Ecumenon, that plays out the deterministic processes of logic, making time itself into a formality, a calculable number of microseconds between initial state and terminal state, or between input and output. Divisible in the digital into chunks of arbitrarily small size, space and time can be readily manipulated, empowering the digital’s signal ability to simulate. As representations made of pure abstraction, space and time do not exert in the digital the sorts of inexorable constraints and directed possibilities that they do in the actual. Solar systems and molecules appear side-by-side on the screen, thousands of simulated years can be compressed into a second, or a complex process can be slowed down, stopped, reversed, or resequenced for observation and analysis. Simulated objects, untethered from a materiality that would give them particular characteristics, need not behave like the objects they appear to be: a mountain can be weightless, a ruler can oversee millennia of continuous history, a refrigerator can transform smoothly into a set of keys.

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Guided by such examples as these, one observes in the two faces of each plane a strange divide, characteristic of the digital, that separates form from content, or structure from value. As with the bit, structure— its boundaries and its place in sequence—is determined from outside of it, whereas its value—0 or 1—is given on its inside. Place is assigned without regard for value. This divide persists in the bit’s material, which designates individual bits separately and by a different reason from their values. The two-faced character of each plane, modeled on the bit’s original two distinctions (of value and place), establishes a gap at the heart of digital operation, dividing form from content, structure from value. In the actual world, form and content are not just coincident but are tied together, they have the same reason, or at least deeply entangled reasons. Thought sound, to return to our chief example, is entangled in its world through strands of idea and material, a reason that brings together threads from disparate ontological registers to tell the sonic story. A sound sounds like its origin, and it speaks to what is to come, bringing time, space, matter, and motion into sympathetic resonance. (Or is it the resonance that brings about the sound?) Separating, in the digital, form of form from form of content severs sound from its reason and the spatial displacement at its start. On a digital epistratum, groups form with no reason in their parts, for they are induced as a shadow of a higher plane. And values are determined without any inherent relation to the structure they come to define. Though the term is normally reserved in computer jargon for certain structures on relatively lofty planes of organization, we might call any grouping on a discrete digital surface a digital object. Objects are made of parts, each of which is given as a quality. Parts and qualities are not really distinct, but refer to two sides of the same plane. Parts are given by the structures outlined on a plane, while qualities are given by the values of the bits grouped into those structures. A part is an outline, a formal structure, while a quality is a formal value. (Form and content are both formalized in the digital, hence form of form and form of content.) They are determined separately but given together; parts are determined from the outside, structures imposed by a logic

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that casts shadows on the plane of equivocation. Qualities fill out those structures, determined from within by the bit values of the enshadowed bits. Parts organize qualities and qualities qualify parts but they do not share a genesis. Digital objects therefore have no reason in themselves but from without, as they are equivalent to the collection of their part-qualities. Digital objects could be described as groupings of qualified parts.17 Thus the digital offers two lines of determination, one of value and one of place, one of quality and one of parts. But they both remain formalisms, abstractions, such that they await their content and meaning in a contact with the outside. That is, a sequence of bits that represents a numeric value does not represent the intensity of color in a given color channel except according to a convention built in to the hardware interface of the machine, a convention that refers to perception. It is only in contact with a world of reasons that the digital finds its own reasons. Else it remains inert, indifferent, a formality of structure or a formality of number. So that the values that determine the length of a curved line on the screen or the brightness of a simulated lantern or how many items are in a given menu, these values, equivocal in themselves, become significant when given a reason, not just the actualization of possibilities but the idea of a future. Surfaces of encounter reach from the plane of equivocation to the “graphical user interface,” but these many interfaces do not stop at the boundaries of the computer hardware. The digital extends beyond its hardware’s edges, meeting the world only by touching what is already digital in it. Thus, even outside of the machine, perception of the digital also shows two faces, one turned toward discrete elements related by deterministic logic and one turned toward the abyss of thought. “In short, both exterior and interior are interior to the stratum” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 49). The eye does not cease to see pixels, even when, as Apple claims of its retina displays, the individual pixels lie below the threshold of human visual perception. For one sees not only a version of the image represented by the data that produced that image, one sees also the possibilities of other images—filters, erasures, partitions,

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replacements, rearrangements—possibilities inherent to the digital milieu because inherent to the bit. Thought sound, carrying its origins with it, does not share digital sound’s nostalgia for what could have or might have been. Indifferent to those many roads not taken, equally comfortable with any path, digital sound could always suddenly become something else, any available data, and the combinatoric character of the digital suggests the proximity of every possible next sound. Any sound might come next, any value might be the next value; bits, or their values, have no reason but the austere self-satisfaction of numbers, perfect unto themselves and so without reason. As possibility, all of the digital’s achievements are already inscribed in its equivocation. To encounter the digital is to choose among discrete possibilities, possibilities that inhere in the encounter with digital sound. At some point—in some subsystem or at the end of some bus or in some computer peripheral—the data and code cede a measure of their ideality, mapping their abstract numeric values to a concrete, analog, continuous property, usually, as a first step, a flow of electricity. The continuous electrical flow results from a digital-to-analog conversion (decoding) that takes a sequence of discrete data as input and produces a continuous signal flow (electricity) as output. (Even on the digital side of this conversion, the discrete data to be decoded are materially instantiated in bits as continuous electrical flows; but those continuous flows are engineered to simulate a perfect binary logic, to behave like discrete bits with discrete values.) For example, through a D-to-A conversion, a number encoded in bits might regulate an electric potential that determines how brightly the blue component of a given pixel should shine for the next sixtieth of a second (until the next datum comes down the pipeline). In the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, the digital-to-analog conversion is both a decoding and a reterritorialization. It decodes a stream of bits, according to established conventions built into the hardware of the machine, to generate a phenomenon whose codes are not those of a discrete machine but of human culture and embodied

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perception. As it decodes it also reterritorializes, moving from an ideal stream of numbers essentially unrelated to their material substrate to an actual, perceptible phenomenon, concretized in time, space, and a material context essential its meaning. How does this visible datum make any more difference than it did when it was a sequence of 0s and 1s? But that is precisely the distinction selected by adding thought to sound. To make a difference, that blueishness or that pixel require a further destination, a destiny beyond the digital; is it enough that someone sees it? The human is a bulwark against the collapse of difference back into the binary. Grouping is real, parts and qualities are real, but all continue to refer to an outside, a beyond in which the digital’s equivocal abstraction does not hold sway. It would be mistaken to conflate this connection from the digital to its outside with the well trodden notion of interactivity. Interaction typically comes late, as the last gesture of contact between digital and actual. Interaction could never happen, would be purely accidental, were it not for the countless conventions that contribute to the history of digital technologies; the outside determines the meaning of the digital in terms of an accretion of habits, indexed to vision, hearing, and the action of touching as the privileged senses of rationality. These conventions that have grown alongside digital technologies as their final and formal causes give sense to the equivocal structures that cover the digital’s planes of organization. Conventions associate designated bits in indexed computer memory with particular pixels on the monitor, for example, giving those bits meaning as image, color, shape, etc. Other conventions determine formulas and mechanisms to turn bits into sound. Coding is entirely an adherence to conventions, syntactic regulation and rules of order that map codes onto logical processes and simple operations on bits; these rules restrict the meaning of those codes, enforcing a logical transparency in place of the polysemy of language. Like all digital conventions, code looks in two directions, facing outward toward a world of sense, and inward toward an ideal domain of perfect logic. Designed to allow easy reference to the part-qualities of

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complex data structures and methods for manipulating them, code assails digital objects as worldly, investing meaning in the conventional determinations that draw outlines on the outward-facing surfaces of the digital’s many layers. Restricting expression with formal definitions and a rigid syntax that govern every term, code insists on a digital mode of address, where every statement refers to well defined, logical operations on discrete groups of bits, and every command is directed at some specifiable end. This contact with the outside, an accumulation of convention built in to the logic of the machine, repercusses all the way back to the plane of bits, satisfying the structures and numbers, the 0s and 1s of the Ecumenon, and giving them a reason. An individual bit becomes meaningful as 0 or 1 as determined by this encounter with difference, the staged connection of formal quality to actual quality.18 But the bit remains formal in itself, even as it admits this donation of meaning from without. Bits retain their equivocal stance, even as they carry that stance into the actual. One symptom of this equivocation is the glib, cynical, or ironic character of much digital culture: the digital is impoverished, a “mere” simulation, and the lack of precarity in the digital may present an intractable limit.19 In another sense but according to the same logic, the digital is thoroughly precarious, as its mighthave-been destabilizes its values into a combinatoric haze of possibilities. That is, one encounters in the digital not only the simulation of objects but also a determinate set of determinate possibilities of what those objects could be or could become. But the possibilities for an object are aimed at that object taken as a group of part-qualities, any of which can be individually altered independently of the others. Digital possibility respects the separation of the two sides of each plane, the split into parts and qualities, the division between form and substance, between ideal and actual, the ubiquitous increment that induces always another layer, a new reterritorialization on a new inside and outside. Digital objects are equivalent to the collection of their parts, and those parts are ever at our service. What is a computer program but a possibility access interface?20

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Digital code is possibilistic in still another sense. For the most part, code does not execute but stands by in fast-access memory banks. Most subroutines await their turn at the Central Processing Unit, when they will be invoked by some already running process. Process algebras— mathematical models of the way computer code works—capture very well this uncommitted modality of “standing by,” pure possibility without actualization; in general, this is a hallmark of mathematics, to offer assertions of indefinite mode, symbolic abstractions that make no claim on the actual, but rest on grounds internal to mathematical discourse.21 These statements hover in an indeterminate modality. They are at the ready, but as statements of pure logic, they are, for the moment, outside of time. One of the simplest digital operations, often associated with a single command in a computer processor’s machine language, is copying of data from one memory location to another. Indeed, the possibilistic character of the digital implies the triviality of digital reproduction. Copying a bit value from one indexed location to another is a basic function of bitwise operation, and iterative repetition of this operation over a set of data large or small is almost as trivial. There is a minimal material cost of making a copy, and the simplicity of this bit-for-bit reproduction means that there is almost no time cost, either. Thus does the digital reproduce itself perfectly and without effort. Not time nor space but logic becomes the dominant organizing force of the digital, which, unburdened by the massive and enduring forms of space and time, exposes its entire inside at once, a condition prosaically referred to as “random access.” The digital is made of logic and made by logic. Compared even to language, whose linear sequentialism is tied to time (as speech) and space (as writing), the digital gains an even higher degree of abstraction. One might imagine every point on the Ecumenon connected to every other, by virtue of the numerical indexing scheme that allows bits to act on other bits. This abstract dimensionality of the digital stays faithful to the plodding sequentialism of the processor; notwithstanding current popular advances in parallel processing, digital processors still treat digital codes

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in strict sequence, admitting and acting on commands one at a time. Linear but randomly accessible, the digital exhibits a hyperlinearity. In Deleuze and Guattari’s study of strata, the mode of reproduction in each case reveals a stratum’s dimensionality. The crystal, on the geological stratum, reproduces by expanding outward along its borders, absorbing layers of material (epistrata) into its crystalline form. It moves outward in three dimensions at once, but only at its surfaces, which form a complex stack of layers between inner material already crystallized and outer material still to be incorporated (or not). A significantly different organization characterizes the organic stratum, where reproduction refers to coded strands of formed substance, which decode to produce proteins. The double helix unwinds in reproduction, exposing the code’s spatial linearity, so that its elements may be read in sequence. “The essential thing is the linearity of the nucleic sequence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 59). The third stratum, the cerebro-neural stratum, exhibits a superlinearity, a temporal linearity untied from spatial constraint—the prime example is language—that gives language enough abstraction to reach all of the other strata. The digital steps over a further threshold, abstracting even time and space to achieve a logical linearity, hyperlinearity.

Digital sound, thought Another description of hyperlinearity: the digital stratum organizes organization per se. It refers only to itself, and it does so unimpeded by the contingencies of materiality. Given its logical ideality, the digital includes no motion, only the representation of motion. It consigns the continuous traverse from one discrete state to another to its materiality, and then disregards or minimizes that materiality by design. (A material bit changing its value from 0 to 1 undergoes a change of magnetic field strength, which passes through a continuum of intervening values as a matter of physical necessity. But the logic that determines the structural significance of a bit switches its value from 0 to 1 without anything in between.)

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By contrast, sound is motion, and heard sound or thought sound contracts that motion into singular qualities of timbre, volume, pitch, and rhythm. Sound carries with it the displacement at its origin. And it implies through its motion its potential, a modulation of the vibration that constitutes sound to begin with. Thought sound is about anticipation, expectation, implication. Sound is directed, it’s going somewhere. Standing apart but tied to its past and future, thought sound is an event. Digital sound, like everything in the digital, is simulated, a motion represented but not actually included in the digital: stop-motion sonography. Does simulation preclude the event? If digital sound has a past and future, these are not implicated dimensions of what is foremost a motion, but disconnected posits, lacking a common internal sense. The motion of digital sound cannot be found in the datum currently directing the processor, but exists separately, future data to be generated or read from a digital storage surface. In place of an event, the digital refers to the possible; digital sound is the sound of possibility. A sound made digital (or born digital) can be copied, measured, tweaked, sampled, reversed, compressed, etc.; it becomes available for a great set of possible manipulations. Precisely the opposite obtains for thought sound. Thought sound, on the order of the event, is a happening that cannot be reproduced, that does not even admit a concept of the same. Tied deeply into its milieu, thought sound defies representation that would purport to capture it as a separable and discrete occurrence. So is digital sound, as a product of digital culture, the sound that we hear today, sound that might be captured, reproduced, remixed, mashed up, filtered, recontextualized, played ironically? Is this what it means to hear digital sound as possibility, to hear all sound as digital possibility? A digital sound is a sound that reveals itself as possibility, the sound of the possible. It would be an uncomplicated distinction in principle: thought sound is sound heard in and of its milieu; digital sound is sound heard in terms of its possible redeployments, its value as a building block of a digital culture. It is therefore a trade-off: sound captured digitally discards its history and its implicated future but becomes available for other operations,

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piecemeal and predictable manipulation, plugging in rather than being heard. An event is singular but the singular can never be adequately represented; thus digital sound discards that portion of sound that is an event, removing sound from its milieu. The discarded portions of sound are not restored, but some history, some implicated future is reinjected into the digital sound when it is heard, when it is thought, and the digital’s pendant reliance on its outside ensures this opportunity. But what is restored or regiven to sound? Its origin as digital? An implication gathered from its data? Must we be satisfied with a sonic world in which sound presents its many possibilities at the cost of its potential for thought?

Notes 1 Lest this sound somehow condemnatory, I should point out that every media technology operates in accord with a set of assumptions—norms or conventions. LP records, which have the signal literally inscribed (scratched) into the spiral groove of their soft surfaces, house a deliberately altered version of the “original” signal, with low pitches attenuated and higher pitches emphasized. This contrivance, the RIAA equalization curve, is designed to make LP sound storage and playback more accurate and efficient: loud, low pitches would require very wide grooves to inscribe accurately and lead to distortion, while soft higher pitches would be buried under the surface noise of the record. The RIAA curve thus compensates for material deficiencies in vinyl records, but on playback the signal must be decoded by applying the inverse equalization curve, usually in the preamplification stage. 2 There are multiple ways to represent a sound in digital code. There are methods, for example, of taking a sequence of numbers representing the oscillating amplitude of a signal and making the sequence shorter by eliminating some of the numbers to compress the data. It can be played back by decompressing the signal to regenerate an approximation of the discarded data, reconstituting (inexactly) the original sequence of numbers. Or consider the possibility of writing coded instructions

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to produce a sequence of numbers that could be turned into heard sound; is this not also a digital representation of sound? The point is that there is no bottom line, no “true” representation of a sound in the digital domain. The digital is already a mediation, and so imposes its medial character on its objects and actions. Moreover, its representations rely on a model of what sound is and what hearing is, theories of acoustics and psychoacoustics. “Maps should be made of these things, organic, ecological, and technological maps one can lay out on the plane of consistency” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 61). The digital does not altogether dematerialize of course. Aside from the peripheral hardware that actualizes the central layer of the interface, a privileged plane of encounter between user and digital, even the computer processors, a churn of bits, remain solid pieces of recalcitrant materiality, demanding power, limiting speed, taking up space and heft. But this hardware is designed to get out of the way to the greatest extent possible, a rule that has almost unfailingly governed the historical progress of digital technologies. These traces of materiality in the machine do not betray the division between the formal value of the bit and the localized material property that represents that value, like a window that allows one to see whatever is on its other side without prejudice. Compare this to Kirschenbaum’s notion of formal materiality. Perhaps these are analogous or at least complementary notions, formal materiality and materialized abstraction, but the noun in each case shows where the emphasis is placed: Kirschenbaum wishes to highlight the materiality of digital form, while the present study names abstraction the distinctive “formation of power” of the digital, which minimizes the drag of the digital material as much as possible. “For, in their combination on chip, silicon and its oxide provide for perfect hardware architectures. That is to say that the millions of basic elements work under almost the same physical conditions, especially as regards the most critical, namely temperature dependent degradations, and yet, electrically, all of them are highly isolated from each other. Only this paradoxical relation between two physical parameters, thermal continuity and electrical discretization on chip, allows integrated circuits to be not only finite state machines like so many other devices on earth, but to

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8

9

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approximate that Universal Discrete Machine into which its inventor’s name has long disappeared” (Kittler 1997: 153–54). There are no exact values in the real world, only degrees of precision. Thus in order to ensure that every bit is read by the system as either 0 or 1, the values—of magnetic field strength or electrical potential or reflectivity or some other property of a substrate used to encode bit values—are treated as 0 when they are within a range of value close to the nominal designated value, and likewise for values of 1. So, if a system uses the convention that a voltage of +2V is considered a value of 0, then it will likely also treat a bit whose voltage reads +1.8V as a 0, using a “close enough” principle. Consider the asymmetry between plus-one and the n that it increments. The expression is itself misleading, because it does not indicate with sufficient intensity its own asymmetry. The increment is an operation, whereas n is just a static point, equal to itself. In fact this means that there is a certain irony in the pseudo-mathematical expression, n+1, in that the variable is the fixed part while the seemingly more concrete addend is the dynamic element. Renaissance mathematicians distinguished between the thing to be increased, the augend or first term of the sum, and the thing that increases, the addend or second term of the sum, preserving an asymmetry in the operation of addition, one that takes one element as given and the other as to be given. To establish the bit’s inclusion of dynamic difference it would be enough to identify a single bit bearing the same value over time, implying that the concept of the bit by itself already includes both vectors of abstraction. The place of a bit often determines its power: when used to represent integer numbers, for example, bits are ordered from least significant to most significant, where a bit’s significance refers to what power of two (2n) it determines. “We may therefore use the term central layer, or central ring, for the following aggregate comprising the unity of composition of a stratum: exterior molecular materials, interior substantial elements, and the limit or membrane conveying the formal relations. There is a single abstract machine that is enveloped by the stratum and constitutes its unity. This is the Ecumenon, as opposed to the Planomenon of the plane of consistency” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 50).

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12 Bits are individually accessed using a numerical index. It is a powerful feature of the digital that its code can operate on the elements of that very code; the code can point to a bit with trivial simplicity. In the digital, the binary code thereby has the power of self-reference built in to it. 13 “It goes from a center to a periphery, at the same time as the periphery reacts back upon the center to form a new center in relation to a new periphery. Flows constantly radiate outward, then turn back. There is an outgrowth and multiplication of intermediate states, and this process is one of the local conditions of the central ring (different concentrations, variations that are tolerated below a certain threshold of identity). [. . .] We will use the term epistrata for these intermediaries and superpositions, these outgrowths, these levels” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 50). 14 “We will apply the term ‘parastrata’ to the second way in which the central belt fragments into sides and ‘besides,’ and the irreducible forms and milieus associated with them. This time, it is at the level of the limit or membrane of the central belt that the formal relations or traits common to all of the strata necessarily assume entirely different forms or types of forms corresponding to the parastrata” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 52). 15 Digital code allows access to multiple planes, provides ways of referencing and manipulating structured data of greater and lesser complexity, and such access is explicitly termed an interface to the data structure in question. 16 Structured programming reveals this nested hierarchy of layers. Objects, their parts, and their parts’ parts are often explicitly specified in the code text, the name of an object, followed by the name of one of its parts, followed by the name of a subpart, with a lexical mark such as a period or colon separating them. 17 The distinction between run-time and compile-time reinforces the two-sidedness; in compile-time, the programmer designs structures using coded instructions. In run-time, the user determines the specific nature of those structures, actualizing possibilities proffered by the executing software, by providing values for the bits that constitute the outlined structures. (Though it is a reasonable gloss of the difference between programming and executing a program, this distinction between compile-time and run-time is undoubtedly an oversimplification, which

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ignores, for one thing, the lack of any real distinction between data, structure, and instruction in the digital.) “Nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization go from the central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 53). Bert Dreyfus (2009) writes plainly and compellingly on the limited investment in the digital in On the Internet. Thus does Hansen include in his understanding of digital image the possibilities for manipulating or altering that image. Certainly some mathematical statements feel more closely bound to the actual world than do others; whole number arithmetic, 5+7=12, seems somehow unassailable, at least to many thinkers (and adders). Whereas statements about transfinite numbers and infinite dimensional spaces feel more closely tethered to the axioms and definitions that give rise to those statements, and a bit farther from our living world.

Works cited Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dreyfus, H. (2009), On the Internet. New York City : Routledge. Galloway, A. (2004), Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Hansen, M. (2004), New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Kirschenbaum, M. (2008), Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Kittler, F. (1997), “There Is No Software,” in J. Johnston (ed.), Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International.

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sonic thought iv

Sonotypes Sebastian Scherer

CAVEAT: The following is more than a text. It rather comes in different forms. Originally delivered as a talk / performance at the 2013 sound|thinking conference in Frankfurt, Germany, various other incarnations of it will be explored in what is to come here. This is normally not the way I do it when giving talks, however today I will read out my text word by word. This is an experiment. I will try not to make any mistakes or digressions. A couple of months ago, when I was thinking about this conference, and my possible part in it, these humble 20 minutes, I soon decided to take things very literally: sound thinking. This talk is going to be about a possible interrelation of sound and thought—and the transition from thought to sound. What interested me were different ways of actualizing thought, especially what I was doing when formulating this talk: manifesting the results of my thought process in a written form. This process of writing, of bringing these ephemeral thoughts down to paper, the becoming of text, entails yet another thought process, in refining and completing my ideas by finding appropriate, unequivocal expressions for them. So when I tried to bring these two spheres—thinking and sound, research and art—closer together, and into a potential dialogue, I had to find a viable method of expressing the results of my thought process sonically. I wanted to devise a concept to translate this process of me thinking and writing—letter after letter, word after word—into a form that is audible. I wanted to turn thought into sound, I wanted to sound out my thoughts—to eventually think sound. 309

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Of course there is the most common form of sonically decoding written information, which is speech. But I wondered if there was a more abstract way of tapping into this signal chain, of reinterpreting and bypassing the apparent conventions and constraints of speech in relation to thought. Maybe this would permit novel ways of comprehension. Maybe this would have the potential to open up alternative perspectives on the very thought process itself and disclose implicit patterns and structures that are not apparent when reading a text in its written form, or when listening to it being presented orally. And indeed, related strategies are employed in other scientific disciplines: for instance by astrophysicists, who use methods of sonification to perceptualize rather large bulks of data. Last year, at the Media-Matter conference we had Frank Scherbaum here in Frankfurt, a geophysicist from Potsdam University, who transposed the infrasonic rumblings of seismic activity to the audible range of the frequency spectrum, in order to get better analytical leverage on the readings of his sensors and probes. And a couple of weeks ago I talked to a neurolinguist from the University of Mainz, who similarly listens to the waveform-output of his EEG machines, which record the cranial activity of test-persons, who are confronted with non-standard or irregular syntax structures. So I thought: since the natural sciences are doing it, why not in the humanities? When writing nowadays, the tools of choice are oftentimes no longer pen and paper, or the trusty typewriter, but rather a computer and a keyboard. Now the term “keyboard” is however rather ambiguous: it bears a double meaning, because it obviously not only connotes an input device for the computer, but also the manual interface for many musical instruments. A first idea was to approach this on machine level: I tried to solder an output jack to a standard computer keyboard and plug that into a preamplifier in order to make audible the scancode signals that the keyboard produces when different keys are pressed. This, however, is easier said than done. I had the naive notion that listening to the output of the keyboard would produce a stream of audio information not

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unlike the acoustic-couplers in old modems or fax machines. And I cracked an old computer keyboard open and took it apart (which is a rather disgusting thing to do). But when fumbling around with the delicate electronic innards of the keyboard, I soon decided that this endeavor would exceed my hacking and engineering capabilities by far. Doing further research in the direction of sonification, I soon stumbled across a rather unsuccessful invention by the French-Irish physicist Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe from the year 1913, called the Optophone. This device was originally conceptualized as a reading aid for blind people. It translated printed letters via photoelectric sensors into correspondingly pitched acoustic signals. However, the practical application turned out to be rather difficult, because the interpretation of the resulting toneclusters was a delicate and cumbersome process, permitting a reading frequency of only a few words per minute—and only blind persons who were specifically trained for this process could accomplish an accurate rate that high.1 So sitting at my desk, where I was reading, researching, and writing these lines, I realized I had everything I needed already right in front of me: next to my computer keyboard sits a MIDI -controller musical keyboard (Figure v.1).

Figure iv.1

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When we look at the octave in the standard western musical notation system, it is obvious, that the naming of the musical notes is indeed derived from the alphabet. When reciting one of the most common musical scales, C major, we start out with a C. So the sequence of steps in the octave would be CDEFGABC . If however, we start with the A, like the alphabet does, we would get an equally familiar sequence of ABCDEFGA . This simple realization was the central idea for this experiment—and I started right away: I assigned the alphabetical letter A to the musical note A1 on the keyboard, then the letter B to the subsequent note B1, et cetera. After seven pairs of letters and notes I continued this sequence in the next higher octave, by assigning the letter H to the note A2, the letter I to the note B2, and so on, working my way through the alphabet. Trying to stay within the confines and conventions of Western music, I had to make some deliberate decisions and concessions when devising this framework for my project. For instance, this modus operandi would ignore all the black keys on the keyboard in order to stay in the C major scale. I also decided to assign the spaces between words and sentences to musical rests: 16th rests between words, eighth rests after complete sentences and quarter rests after complete paragraphs. For simplicity’s sake, I ignored capital letters and punctuation symbols, except for commata and full stops, which are again assigned to musical rests. I experimented with the idea of inserting various percussive elements to represent the punctuation, but I found that this would divert the attention away from the musical notes.2 Since I accomplished this process with the help of a sequencer program, I had the possibility to assign virtually any sound a synthesizer or sampler could produce, because technically speaking, up to that point I was just programming MIDI -data. For abstraction’s sake, I could have used simple, rather neutral sounding sinewaves. Or pitched audio-samples of singing birds, or barking dogs for that matter. But since I was already working with a keyboard (and the piano roll in my sequencer program), I decided to stay true to the keyboard analogy and use the sounds of a sampled grand piano.

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Another purely aesthetic decision was to add a little touch of reverb to the sound of the sampled piano, to make it less dry sounding. In retrospect this seems all the more fitting, since this project essentially deals with reflection. So when placing these notes in my sequencer, I almost felt like a musical typesetter, who coordinates the lead types of every letter to form words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and eventually whole books. Ironically, this profession has become virtually obsolete since computer technology took over in printing shops, some 30 or 40 years ago. And here I was, sitting in front of a computer, setting types. However, my typesetting environment looked more like Figure v.2. This mode of working turned out to be a very painstaking, but also almost meditative activity. It demanded a constant recursion to the text: I started refining expressions, weighing words, rethinking every sentence, every letter. It took time, but it also gave me time—time to think: I was reminded of the speech Eurythmy dancing in Waldorf schools, which aims to express the letters and sounds of poetry via elegant gestures and movements. Also the printing telegraph came to mind, a mid-nineteenth century communication device with a strangely familiar interface (Figure v.3). On a similar note, I found that this project bears a certain resemblance to some positions of conceptual art in the 1960s. Think, for instance, of

Figure iv.2

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Figure iv.3

Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 artwork “One and three chairs” which shows a chair, next to a photograph of it, next to the printed encyclopedia entry of the term “Chair”. The work of art here is dematerialized: it is NOT constituted by the chair or this combination of objects. They just describe the actual work: the art itself is the concept of the chair, the idea, the ephemeral thought (cf. Lippard 1973). Consequently, this project manifests itself in various self-reflexive forms: there is the print-out of my script right here, you hear me speaking it out, I also rendered the notation sheets for it, of which you can see the first one right here (Figure v.4). Then there is the waveform display of the rendered audio (Figure v.5) and finally we will listen to the audio version itself. Unfortunately, the completed composition of my talk turned out to be way longer than I expected it to be, when using 16th note values and rendering at a reasonable speed of 100 beats per minute. Playing it back faster would blur and obliterate sonic detail that I consider essential to the experience. This is why we will only be able to listen to selected

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Figure iv.4

Figure iv.5

excerpts of it. However, for those interested, I will upload an mp3-file of the full composition to our conference-website.3 So I would like to invite you to take a few minutes to listen to the actual sound of the text I just presented to you. It will convert thought— via the detour of writing and retyping—again to its ephemeral form, not unlike speech, but presenting a different, maybe somewhat idiosyncratic, but by no means inconsistent, rendition of it. Maybe this will bore you, maybe you will be amused, maybe this will shed a new light on things. I don’t know yet, it’s an experiment and it’s a premiere. I just hope there are no typos in it. Ladies and gentlemen: the Sonotypes.

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Notes 1 During the 1920s, the Dada-artist Raoul Hausmann further developed the idea of the Optophone and turned it into a mechanical art object, which could simultaneously convert light into sound, and vice-versa. 2 Endnotes, however, are played back at double the speed and only 75% of the volume. 3 See and hear: https://soundcloud.com/sscherer/sonotypes.

Work cited Lippard, L. (1973), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley : University of California Press.

Index Aboulafia, Abraham 16, 189–90 abstraction 3, 19, 124, 166, 190, 195, 232, 265, 283–90, 293–4, 296, 298, 300–1, 304 n.5, 305 n.9, 312 acoustic ecology xv, 51–3, 56–7, 59, 61, 61 n.3 Adams, John Luther xiii, 13, 114–19, 128, 129 n.3, 129 n.4, 129 n.5 Anahata Nada 85 anthropic subversion 14, 136–41, 145–7, 152–4 anthropocene (post-anthropocene) 128, 146–7 apparatus of capture 68, 73, 76 ars sermonis 59–60 artistic research ix, 3, 6–7, 10, 23–7, 29, 36–8, 120 aural architecture 17, 222–5 autoactive systems xiv–xv, 173–4 autobiographical 10, 23–4, 26, 29, 35, 90–1 Bacon, Francis xv, 264, 265 n.3, 266 n.5 Barthes, Roland 34, 74, 92, 126–7 bats 44, 171 binary 143, 175, 285–6, 290–1, 297–8, 306 n.12 Blesser, Barry 222, 224 body xiii, 1, 6, 11, 17–19, 45, 68, 73, 85, 95, 114, 117, 119, 122, 124, 126–7, 129 n.5, 130 n.9, 143–5, 147, 155 n.4, 161, 163, 182, 198, 205, 220–1, 223, 225–7, 234–5, 237, 250, 252, 257–9, 263–5, 266 n.6, 284 Cage, John xii, 8, 101–2, 107, 115, 117–18, 126, 204, 211, 271–2

cardiac system 123, 125 chimes 45 chóra 172, 175 churches xvi, 45 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 187–8 Clicks & Cuts 246–7 code 167, 194, 223, 250, 260–1, 284, 286–8, 291–2, 294, 297–301, 303 n.2, 306 n.12, 306 n.15, 306 n.16, 306 n.17 conversation 44, 51–2, 58, 60–1, 72, 75, 79–80, 159, 193 DeLanda, Manuel 102 Deleuze, Gilles xiii, xv, 3–5, 7, 9, 19, 20 n.1, 104–5, 108 n.3, 108 n.4, 112–17, 125, 127–8, 128 n.2, 142, 175, 244, 247, 264, 265 n.3, 266 n.5, 266 n.6, 266 n.7, 271–3, 277 Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari xvii, 4–6, 17–18, 105, 108 n.3, 112–13, 118, 120, 123–4, 127, 130 n.7, 137–8, 141–5, 150, 152–3, 161, 166, 243–4, 251–3, 254 n.2, 258, 265, 265 n.3, 271–2, 276, 284–5, 296–7, 301, 304 n.3, 305 n.11, 306 n.13, 306 n.14, 307 n.18 becoming 1, 4, 7–8, 14, 18–19, 104, 112–13, 116–19, 123, 127–8, 129 n.5, 143–5, 148–9, 151, 153, 244, 259, 264–5, 266 n.7, 309 milieu 112, 116, 118, 120–2, 124–5, 137–8, 247, 260–1, 263, 281, 285, 291, 297, 302–3, 306 n.14 style 127, 139, 151, 153, 264

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difference 19, 67, 106, 112, 116, 120, 125, 127, 142, 164, 174, 182, 207, 246, 248–50, 252, 260–1, 271–2, 274–5, 277, 284–92, 298–9, 305 n.9, 306 n.17 digital x, xiv, 19–20, 72–3, 116, 218, 222, 227, 243, 248, 281, 283–303, 303 n.2, 304 n.4, 304 n.5, 306 n.12, 306 n.15, 307 n.17, 307 n.19, 307 n.20 discreteness 285, 289 dispositive 219, 222–4 Dunn, David 13, 114, 119–23, 125, 128 echoes 5, 34, 43, 67, 85, 138, 282 environment ix, 6, 8, 11–12, 28, 51–61, 76, 114, 117–18, 129 n.3, 156 n.5, 182, 212–14, 219, 234, 236, 238, 249, 282, 313 epistemology 17, 149, 151, 161, 174, 220, 227–8, 234, 246 ermida 43, 48 Eshun, Kodwo 229, 235–7 event 2, 4, 13, 31, 52, 66, 78, 85–6, 94, 99, 103–7, 108 n.4, 116–17, 142, 146–7, 164, 167–8, 175, 183–4, 194, 198, 201–2, 204, 206–10, 212–14, 217, 221, 224, 226, 229–30, 232, 243, 252, 269, 271, 274, 281–4, 302–3

Max Black xi, 93 Stifters Dinge xi, 94, 96 Golem 15–16, 181, 189–90 Heidegger, Martin 11, 39 n.3, 61, 205–6 Hölderlin, Friedrich 11, 51, 61 human xii, 2, 4, 8, 13–14, 18, 26, 51, 60–1, 77–8, 84, 93–6, 102, 107, 113–15, 118, 120–4, 128, 129 n.5, 135–41, 143–51, 153–4, 156 n.5, 160–1, 163, 171, 174–5, 181–3, 186–7, 189–90, 222–3, 227, 245–6, 257, 259, 263–5, 265 n.1, 271, 273, 282, 284, 293, 296–8 hyperlinear 285, 292, 301 hyperstition 151–5 information xii, xiv, 53, 58–9, 102, 116, 159, 165, 173, 207, 230, 232, 245, 250, 257, 270–1, 275–8, 286, 310 in|human 13–14, 111, 114, 119, 123, 125, 128 inhuman (sound) 13–14, 114, 135–7, 139–51, 153–5, 247 insects 2, 9, 111, 113, 119–23 intertextuality 34, 39 n.8, 164 Italy 11, 68, 74, 78 Jackson, Michael 261

faciality 143–4 felt sense 225, 227 field recording xv–xvi, 11–12, 66, 70, 74, 83–4, 88, 115, 121 formative listening 51, 55 future of music xii, 269, 282 Gendlin, Eugene T. 225, 227–8, 231–2 generative xvi, 126, 214, 227–8, 231–2, 235, 238, 284, 286, 290–1 genius loci x, 30–4, 37, 39 n.3, 39 n.6 Goebbels, Heiner Berlin Q-Damm 12.4.81 88

keyboard 20, 183, 310–12 Kircher, Athanasius 183–4 Kosuth, Joseph 314 Kubick, Chris and Anne Walsh 106–7 Laruelle, François xvii, 17–18, 99, 108 n.1, 243–5, 248, 251–4, 254 n.2, 254 n.3 layer x, 8, 29, 31, 34–6, 53, 74, 76, 88–9, 121, 170, 210, 229, 284–5, 290–2, 294, 299, 301, 304 n.4, 305 n.11, 306 n.16, 307 n.18

Index logos 16, 186–7 Lyotard, Jean- François 264, 266 n.5 Marsyas 186–7 materiality 6, 9, 26, 102, 113, 162, 164, 167, 224, 237, 285, 287, 289, 294, 301, 304 n.4, 304 n.5 McLuhan, Herbert Marshall 11, 54–8, 62 n.4, 62 n.8 media archaeology 160, 166, 217 mediation 10, 144, 273, 277, 304 n.2 memory ix, 10, 12, 23–4, 26, 29, 34–6, 65–8, 71, 74–9, 80 n.3, 81 n.4, 84–5, 155 n.4, 298, 300 Messiaen, Olivier 111, 113–15, 124, 250 meter 13, 33, 66, 69, 111–12, 124–6, 128, 128 n.2, 260 MIDI 311–12 mind-body dichotomy 161 multistability 194 nano-fascism 175 Nietzsche, Friedrich x, 1, 4, 80 n.3, 100, 102, 104, 107, 108 n.2, 204, 272 nodar 48–9 noise 2–3, 8, 19, 33–4, 42–6, 52, 54, 56–7, 70–1, 73, 79, 84, 86, 87, 90, 94–5, 115–16, 118, 123, 129 n.4, 129 n.5, 142, 155 n.2, 217, 223–6, 229, 232, 234, 238, 243, 245–6, 250–1, 257, 263, 269, 276, 282–3, 303 n.1 non-music 10, 17–18, 243–6, 248–54, 271, 273 non-philosophy 15, 99, 136, 203, 252–3, 273 notation xvii, 111, 274, 312, 314 O’Callaghan, Casey 103, 107, 159 Optophone 311, 316 n.1 organised sound x, 193–4, 213, 273, 276 ophtalmocentrism 169 Orpheus 186

319

Parry, Richard Reed 14, 114, 123, 125–8 Paiva River 11, 42, 49 performativity/performative 25–7, 35–7, 39 n.4, 164, 175, 220–1 periphery 306 n.13, 307 n.18 perspective 4, 7, 10, 16, 25, 29, 62 n.4, 76, 113–14, 123, 150, 163, 166–7, 199–203, 222, 276, 290–2, 310 phenomenology x, 68, 171, 175, 194, 196, 198, 203, 208, 211, 221, 227 Plato 4, 160, 167, 169, 172, 175, 184–8, 190 process philosophy 4 refrain 14, 18, 112–13, 115, 120, 122–4, 130 n.7, 135, 137–41, 144, 146–7, 153, 259, 261–2 remix xiv, 85, 251–2, 302 resonance 1, 5–6, 12, 16, 86, 117–18, 121–2, 148, 190, 219, 226, 231, 239 n.3, 257, 261, 263, 281–2, 284, 295 respiratory system 125 rhythmight 246, 248–9, 251–3 river 8–9, 43–9, 67, 105, 119, 187 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 89–92, 95 Roxette 123, 125 sampling 93, 195, 248–50, 254 Schaeffer, Pierre 103, 105, 107, 244 Schafer, R. Murray viii, 11, 51–8, 218 Schopenhauer, Arthur 4, 100, 102, 107, 108 n.2 Schumann, Robert 13, 111, 126 silence 44–5, 90, 93, 95, 147, 167, 223, 251 sonic fiction 17, 235–7 sonification 20, 310–11 sonority 135–8, 144, 147–51, 153–5, 282

320

Index

sound art x, xiv–xv, 2–3, 12, 81 n.5, 101–3, 120, 186, 189, 218, 230, 236 sound propagation 12, 67, 72, 74, 222, 282 soundscape xv–xvi, 11, 14, 51–61, 102, 105, 147, 155 n.2, 217–18, 237, 257, 259 sound source 66, 72, 103, 106, 183–4 sound thinking 1, 3–4, 9–11, 20, 53, 284, 309 sound without organs (SWO ) 14, 135, 151, 153–5 speculative realism 148 strata 72, 170, 284, 301, 306 n.14 Summer, Donna 264 syzygy of permanence and fluency 162, 187 techno xiv, 85, 122–3, 194 technology x, xv, 19, 57, 71, 75, 121, 193, 246, 249, 278, 284, 286, 289, 303 n.1, 313 temporality 16, 150, 195–9, 202–3, 205, 207–12 territory 11–12, 18, 112, 120, 137, 141–3, 259–64 The Black Soft 18–19, 257–8, 260–1, 263–5, 265 n.2 the one 18, 243, 247 the real 18, 102, 107, 117, 167, 190, 243, 245, 251, 253 The Thing (John Carpenter) 259

thinking-through-making 24 thinking-through-media 10, 23, 36–7 Thoreau, Henry David 8–9, 20 n.2 thought 3, 5, 7, 10–15, 18–20, 24, 53, 55, 57, 83, 86, 93, 99, 107, 117, 121–2, 135–7, 139–41, 145, 148–51, 153–5, 161, 169–70, 175, 201–3, 206, 211–12, 221, 226, 234, 237, 243–5, 248, 251, 253–4, 269–73, 275–8, 281–4, 295–8, 301–3, 309–10, 314–15 time-consciousness 197–8, 203, 207–9, 213 timeline 84, 198, 211, 213–14 tinnitus 85, 182 tone color 86 transformation 27–9, 34, 39 n.5, 86, 152, 156 n.5, 225, 228, 243, 248–50 transition 34, 37, 231, 247, 309 transposition 26, 28, 75, 121, 282, 310 typesetting 313 vibration 8, 12, 67–8, 85, 123, 226–7, 233, 257, 281, 283–4, 302 vibrational ontologies 17, 173, 176 walking 9, 11, 13, 20 n.2, 41–2, 46, 73, 85, 89, 124, 138, 143 weather 8, 69, 71, 115–16 Whitehead, Alfred N. 4, 122, 162, 164, 168, 170, 172–6, 244

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