Music and the Transhuman Ear: Ultrasonics, Material Bodies, and the Limits of Sensation (original) (raw)
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Humans are enigmas of artifact. So they conceive some of their most naturally consistent outputs, such as music, as artifact. But there are two opposing directions to conceiving music: (A) as artifact; (B) as something fundamentally natural, even necessary for animal life. But Nature lacks ready instances of humans’ own full set of reflective musical specifications. This lack allows humans the presupposition that (x) Nature has neither precedent nor prototype for humans’ musical outputs, and, therefore, (y) ‘music’ is a ‘human construct’ the essence of which is alien to the entirety of the ‘natural world’. This presupposition trivializes human musicality by (1) overlooking the ontological priority and primal flexibility of human musical sensibility to sound over that of human artifactual music, and (2) rejecting the ways in which that sensibility constitutes part of humans’ primal and enigmatic relation to Nature and the cosmos. Therefore, to conceive music as necessarily an artifact, while seemingly anthropocentric, is contrary to humans’ interests and capacities.
What do we hear when we hear music? A radical phenomenology of music
"What do we hear when we hear music? A radical phenomenology of music". The 9th issue of Studia Phaenomenologica (central dossier: "Michel Henry's Radical Phenomenology" coordinated by Jad Hatem and Rolf Kühn), Studia Phaenomenologica vol. IX/2009, p. 269-286, Publisher: Romanian Society for Phenomenology & Humanitas, Bucharest, Journal Editor(s): Cristian Ciocan, Guest Editor(s): Rolf Kühn & Jad Hatem,400 pages, ISSN: 1582-5647
Listening to Others: Music and the Phenomenology of Hearing
Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and the Social World, : The Continued Relevance of Phenomenology. Essays in Honour of Dermot Moran, ed. by: Anna Bortolan and Elisa Magrì (De Gruyter), 2022
This chapter explores listening through a phenomenological account of sound and rhythm, showing a musical structure in experience. This structure follows the rhythm of a sequence, leading the listener through an event of meaning that allows an other to appear as a self within a temporally constituted sequence of sense. While subject to such relations, listening is constitutively directed towards re-sensing, because we hear in terms of virtualities, whereby sense contains the power of new and unheard of meaning in each moment of its appearance. Such sense appears acoustically in an affective register between joy and despair, forming affective atmospheres, in which emotions are expressed in a manner irreducible to narrative context. The situation described here is characterized by a certain rhythm in which awareness is directed not so much to the corporeal boundaries of self and other but to the event of movement in which each person finds themselves.
In human musicality, only together are its features normally counted by us to be those of 'music' or to be 'musical'. So we may think that any one feature of human musicality does not constitute ‘music’. Thus, though any of these features may sometimes alone be counted ‘musical’, some of them may seem to us to be less ‘musical’ than others. But, in regard to 'music', the most fundamental controversy is whether the essence of 'music' is exclusively a human thing. This begs the question of what is the essence of music. We, of course, may want to know what is the essence that makes some human sonic artifacts 'music', and others not. But, even if we presuppose that the subset of human sonic artifacts that are 'music' are what make that 'music' music, the foundational issue is about how we can have the auditory perception that we call 'music'. For, if humans, as humans, had never perceived 'music', then there could not, in the first place, ever have been any human artifacts that we today call 'music'.
Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, by Brian Kane, Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press, 2014, 336 pp., £44.99 (hardback), ISBN 9780199347841 / 2016, 336 pp., £18.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9780190632212 The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, by François J. Bonnet, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2016, 364 pp., £14.99 (paperback) ISBN: 9780993045875
Towards a Materialist History of Music: Histories of Sensation
This essay examines the history of auditory sensation, and the methodological challenges posed by the recovery of sensory communication. With a focus on physical encounters and the limits of the body, the somatic force of sound is central to the essay’s review of the artist’s physical and sensory capacity as it relates both to the art he or she produces and to his or her way of perceiving it. The essay divides into two sections: first, an examination of issues around historically lost sensations of sound; and second, the recovery of lost soundscapes. The author suggests that sense perception is not an unchanging facet of medical history, but is subject to cultural influences and local norms. The essay seeks to uncover in its various delimited contexts a historically flexible shaping of perception. https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/towards-materialist-history-music-histories-sensation/