Music and the Transhuman Ear: Ultrasonics, Material Bodies, and the Limits of Sensation (original) (raw)

Abstract

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This article explores the interplay between transhumanism and auditory perception, examining how advancements in hearing technologies may redefine our sensory experiences. By analyzing historical perspectives on materialism and contemporary critiques of hearing enhancements, it addresses the implications of a transhumanist approach to music. The discussion emphasizes the significance of the human ear as both a biological apparatus and a potential site for augmentation, positing that these technological interfacing can alter our understanding and experience of music, transcending human limitations.

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References (182)

  1. Various, "Transhumanist Declaration," The Transhumanist Reader, ed. Max More and Natasha Vita-More (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 54-56, at 55.
  2. George Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 2:190.
  3. Lewis Thomas, A Long Line of Cells: Collected Essays (New York: Book-of-the- Month Club, 1990), 36. The golden disc contains performances by Glenn Gould, Prelude and Fugue, WTC II, C Major, Arthur Grumiaux, "Gavotte en rondeau" from the solo violin Partita No. 3 in E, and Karl Richter, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F, first movement. The selection committee was chaired by Carl Sagan. For details, see http://web.mit.edu/lilybui/www/.
  4. David Huron found that "for musical textures employing relatively homogenous timbres, the accuracy of identifying the number of concurrent voices drops markedly at the point where a three-voice texture is augmented to four voices." Huron, "Voice Denumerability in Polyphonic Music of Homogeneous Timbres," Music Perception 6 (1989): 361-82, at 361.
  5. Within musicology, discursive approaches to performance and sensation include Carolyn Abbate, "Music: Drastic or Gnostic?" Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 505-36;
  6. Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014);
  7. and Elizabeth Le Guin, Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). Within sound studies, Nina Eidsheim proposes a "vibrational theory of music" and reframes the concept of sound as "merely a trope" of understanding music, one that neglects the wider phenomenon Music and the Transhuman Ear 243
  8. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/100/2/199/4951391 by guest on 07 July 2023 of vibrational force. See Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 6, 9. Non-music-centric texts include Shelley Trower, Sense of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (New York: Continuum, 2012), and empirical studies include Christian Gaser and Gottfried Schlaug, "Brain Structures Differ Between Musicians and Non-Musicians," Journal of Neuroscience 23 (2003): 9240-45; Niall Griffith and Peter M. Todd, eds., Musical Networks: Parallel Distributed Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999);
  9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (1945; London and New York: Routledge: 2013), 84.
  10. Abbate, "Drastic or Gnostic," 532.
  11. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone [1863/1875], trans. Alexander J. Ellis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 142. By positing an automatic mech- anism that could not be ignored-we lack "ear lids"-Helmholtz required a discrete role for auditory perception, beyond the causal mechanism of stimulus and specific sensation identified by Johannes Mu ¨ller in 1835.
  12. Brian Massumi, Foreword to Gilles Deleuze and Fe ´lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Mineapolis Press, 1987), xvi.
  13. On this point, see particularly Karol Berger, "Musicology According to Don Giovanni, or: Should We Get Drastic?," Journal of Musicology 22 (2005): 490-501, at 497.
  14. Such an argument stretches back at least to David Hume's empiricism and the theory of primary and secondary sense qualities. categories. Thomas Kuhn famously argued that it was anomalies-becoming the insis- tent focus of practitioners-that lead to paradigm changes. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
  15. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, rpt ed. Jonathan Dancy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), §45.
  16. Charles S. Peirce to Lady Welby, 14 March 1909, in Semiotics and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 110. Emphasis added.
  17. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) 92.
  18. Wolfgang Ernst, Sonic Time Machine (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 21.
  19. This precedes even the basic assumption from structural linguists that all com- munication rests on a principle of common coding. See Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 451ff.
  20. "Sodann werden die allzuoft wiederholten Zweifel beseitigt, ob es mo ¨glich sei, 24000 bis gegen 40000 Doppelschwingungen in der Secunde zu ho ¨ren. Es ergab sich, dass man noch To ¨ne der achtgestrichenen Octave nicht allein wahrnehmen, sondern auch von einander unterscheiden kann." Wilhelm Preyer, € Uber die Grenzen der Tonwahrnehmung (Jena: Hermann Dufft, 1876), iii.
  21. "Ich und mehrere Andere haben alle 31 To ¨ne oft geho ¨rt, und, wenn sie von c 6 an der Reihe nach erklingen, vollkommen deutlich erkannt, dass sie bis zum e 8 immer ho ¨her werden. Bis zum c 7 ho ¨rt man auch ohne Schwierigkeit die Tonleiter. Die 7 und 8-gestrichenen To ¨ne sind zwar in der N€ ahe sehr schmerzhaft; man erkennt jedoch, dass sie immer ho ¨her werden und ho ¨rt auch sehr gut bis e 8 die Octaven. . . . Man kann jedoch nicht behaupten, es sei unmo ¨glich, noch ho ¨here To ¨ne hervorzurufen, weil die e 8 -Gabel bei weiterer Verku ¨rzung tonlos wird. Denn ob sie nach der Verku ¨rzung u ¨berhaupt noch in Schwingungen, und zwar genu ¨gend starke Schwingungen ger€ ath, muss nachgewiesen werden, bevor man den Schluss zieht, dass das Ohr versagt." Ibid., 21, 23.
  22. See John Zahm, Sound and Music (Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1892), 83; and Carl Stumpf, "Ueber die Bestimmung hoher Schwingungszahlen durch Differenzto ¨ne," Annalen der Physik und Chemie: Neue Folge 68 (1899): 105-16, at 105.
  23. Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als Physiologische Grundlage fu ¨r die Theorie der Musik, 4th ed. (Brunswick: Friedrich Vieweg and Son, 1877), 30.
  24. Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, 18, 151. Music and the Transhuman Ear 245
  25. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/100/2/199/4951391 by guest on 07 July 2023
  26. "eine wahre positive Empfindung und ebenso verschieden ist von dem Nichtho ¨ren." Preyer, Ueber die Grenzen, iv.
  27. Georg Appunn, Ueber die Helmholtz'sche Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als Grundlage fu ¨r die Theorie der Musik, nebst Beschreibung einiger, zum Theil ganz neuer Apparate welche zur Erl€ auterung und zum Beweis dieser Theorie geeignet sind (Hanau, 1867). See also Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 37-39.
  28. John Augustine Zahm writes that "no one can doubt the skill of Herr Appunn as a mechanician. . . . We are consequently, by the very necessities of the case, com- pelled to accept Herr Appunn's estimate as that of an expert and that he is an expert in his speciality no one can gainsay." Zahm, Sound and Music, 83-84. As late as 1925, Alexander Wood copied Helmholtz in citing Preyer's work before proclaiming, "It may be safely asserted that our ears are sensitive to sounds having frequencies lying between about 30 vibrations per second and 40,000 vibrations per second." See Alexander Wood, The Physical Basis of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 22.
  29. See James Loudon, "A Century of Progress in Acoustics," Science, New Series 14 (1901): 987-95, at 994.
  30. For an account, see David Pantalony, Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig's Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 158-59.
  31. "Die ho ¨chste Pfeife hat nur ca. 11,000 statt ca. 50,000 Schwingungen. . . . Auch diese Gabeln zeigten Fehler bis zu ca. 36,000 Schwingungen." In M. Schaefer, "Literaturbericht," Zeitschrift fu ¨r Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 21 (1899): 141-43, at 142.
  32. In chronological order, the principal texts referring to Preyer's claims are Franz Melde, Akustik: Fundamentalerscheinungen und Gesetze einfach to ¨nender Ko ¨rper (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1883);
  33. Carl Stumpf and Max Meyer, "Schwingungszahlbestimmungen bei sehr hohen To ¨nen," Annalen der Physik und Chemie, Neue Folge 61 (1897): 760-79;
  34. and Stumpf, " € Uber die Bestimmung hoher Schwingungszahlen durch Differenzto ¨ne," Annalen der Physik und Chemie, Neue Folge 68 (1899): 105-16.
  35. "Wie man sieht, sind durch seine [Friedrich Schulzes] Versuche unsere Ergebnisse best€ atigt worden." Stumpf, "Ueber die Bestimmung," 105, 115.
  36. Rudolph Ko ¨nig, "Ueber die ho ¨chsten ho ¨rbaren und unho ¨rbaren To ¨ne," Annalen der Physik 69 (1899): 626-60, 721-38.
  37. The first translation of the term, by Alexander Tille in 1896, was "beyond- man," whereas Nietzsche's preeminent twentieth-century English translator Walter Kaufmann opted for "overman," both of which could be harnessed to the present dis- cussion of what exceeds human capacity. See Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans.
  38. Alexander Tille (London: Macmillan, 1896); and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1978).
  39. "Alle To ¨ne, welche wir ho ¨ren, wu ¨rden freilich fu ¨r solche Menschen unho ¨rbar sein, wenn ihr Ohr € ahnlich organisirt bleibe wie das unrrige, dagegen wu ¨rden sie viel- leicht To ¨ne vernehmen, die wir nicht ho ¨ren, ja vielleicht wu ¨rden sie sogar Licht, welches wir sehen, nur ho ¨ren." Karl Ernst de Baer, Welche Auffassung der lebenden Natur ist die richtige? (Berlin: August Hirschwald, 1862), 30.
  40. "Ein Ton, der fu ¨r uns zwischen 2 Pulsschl€ agen 48,000 Schwingungen macht und der ho ¨chste ist, den wir vernehmen ko ¨nnen, wu ¨rde fu ¨r diese verku ¨rzt lebenden Menschen nur 48 mal zwischen 2 Pulsschl€ agen schwingen und zu den sehr tiefen geho ¨ren." Ibid., 30-31.
  41. "Aber wir ko ¨nnten die Zeitverku ¨rzung des eigenen Lebens in Gedanken noch weiter treiben, bis diese Aether-Schwingungen, die wir jetzt als Licht und Farben empfinden, wirklich ho ¨rbar wu ¨rden. Und ko ¨nnte es in der Natur nicht noch ganz andere Schwingungen geben, die zu schnell sind, um von uns als Schall empfunden zu werden, und zu langsam, um uns als Licht zu erscheinen? . . . Es ist keinesweges wider- sinning, so etwas zu glauben. . . . Giebt das nicht vielleicht ein To ¨nnen des Weltraumes . . . ho ¨rbar fu ¨r ganz andere Ohren als die unsrige?" Ibid., 31-32.
  42. Ezra Pound, "Postscript" to Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 206, 212.
  43. Ibid., 214.
  44. Ibid., 215.
  45. Ibid., 207.
  46. By this I mean artworks as immanent objects that subsist as part of the universe, which are enfranchised by the work concept. Philosopher C. E. M. Joad, for one, pos- ited Shakespeare's Hamlet as a "subsistence object"-an entity, neither material nor mental, that cannot be identified with its script or any individual production, and that constitutes part of the universe, and possess a special quality of being in its own right. Joad, Guide to Philosophy (1936; New York: Dover, 1957), 266-70.
  47. Mark Reybrouck, "Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance," Biosemiotics 5 (2012): 391-409, at 392.
  48. Gary Tomlinson, "Parahuman Wagnerism," Opera Quarterly 29, nos. 3-4 (2013): 186-202, at 192-93.
  49. Most prominently, Eric Clarke describes the experience of musical meaning as "fundamentally-though not exclusively-a perceptual experience . . . [within] a highly structured environmentsubject to both the forces of nature . . . and the pro- found impact of human beings and their cultures." Clarke, Ways of Listening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8, 17.
  50. Milton Babbitt, "Who Cares If you Listen?" High Fidelity 8 (February 1958): 38- 40, 126-27; reprinted as "The Composer as Specialist," The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 50. This entity, but is itself the project of a surface).The Standard Edition explains that it first appeared in the 1927 English translation where it is described as "having been autho- rized by Freud." It does not appear in the German edition.
  51. In its narrowest meaning, Helmholtz's concept of a "mental ear" (geistige Ohr) connotes how directed attention alters the perception of what is empirically given via the senses. Benjamin Steege contextualizes Helmholtz's terms in Helmholtz and the Modern Listener, 73-79; and Veit Erlmann offers a nuanced account of how he came to terms with "the growing sense of distance between interior and exterior" where an- atomical science is "blind" without "some sort of philosophical guidance" in Reason and Resonance (New York: Zone, 2010), 217-70, at 220.
  52. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 94.
  53. "The task of biology consists in expanding in two directions the results of Kant's investigations: (1) by considering the part played by our body, and especially by our sense-organ and central nervous system, and (2) by studying the relations of other subjects (animals) to objects." See Uexku ¨ll, Theoretical Biology [1920] (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1926), xv.
  54. "Immer ist der Raum, der uns umgibt, begrenzt. Einen unbegrenzten Raum kann man sich vielleicht in Gedanken vorstellen, unsere Sinneswerkzeuge kennen ihn nicht. Sie lehren uns, dass wir stets umgeben bleiben von einer vielleicht zerbrechlichen, aber fuer uns gleich unerreichbaren wie undurchdringlichen Seifenblase." Uexku ¨ll, "Wie sehen wir die Natur und wie sieht sie sich selber?," Die Naturwissenschaften 12-14 (1922): 265-71, 296-301, 316-22, at 265. On the relation to Kant's argument about how we perceive the world, see Ernst von Glasersfeld, Radical Constructivism (London: Falmer, 1995), 55; and John Deely, "Semiotics and Jakob on Uexkull's concept of Umwelt," Sign Systems Studies 32 (2004): 11-34.
  55. Uexku ¨ll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: Springer, 1909).
  56. Jakob von Uexku ¨ll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans.
  57. Joseph O'Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 50.
  58. Ibid., 135. This was not in fact a new observation; Uexku ¨ll merely inserted it into an argument about biological determinism. Back in 1852, the writer and Wagner-advocate Richard Pohl made much the same point when questioning utopian claims for an equal artistic-scientific culture: "the physicist concerned with sensory impression fails to ask where he is going . . . the composer with facts of harmony fails to ask where he is coming from." Pohl, "Akustische Briefe: Erster Brief," Neue Zeitschrift fu ¨r Musik 2 (1852): 13. The history of species-specific perception was itself anticipated in early nineteenth-century phrenology. Johann Spurzheim declared that "the world is different to every species of animal, and even to every individual of the same species. . . . It is evident that every sentient being perceives impressions in pro- portion to the number and energy of its sentient faculties." See Spurzheim, The Physiognomical System (London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1815), 528-29.
  59. Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 38-39. Music and the Transhuman Ear 249
  60. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/100/2/199/4951391 by guest on 07 July 2023
  61. Music as World Music," in The Cambridge History of World Music, ed. Phillip V. Bohlman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 75-100.
  62. Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?," in his Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979/2012), 165ff. See also Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
  63. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (1873; London: Viking Penguin, 1982), 42.
  64. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 314.
  65. Joseph Straus, "Normalizing the Abnormal," JAMS 59 (2006): 113-84. Straus, in his pioneering work of disability studies and music, emphasizes the historicity of the concept of physical normality, and its emergence in the early nineteenth century from which disability became understood as a deviation: "neither natural nor permanent, and thus subject to possible remediation" (114). This is set against the broader view within disability studies that any concept of normal is relative to a given culture, within which it represents a statistically predominant physical condition. Impairment, by contrast, represents an empirical deviation therefrom. The most cogent historical account to date is Michel Foucault, Abnormal (Picador, 2007), 26ff. For a comprehen- sive overview of this burgeoning field, see The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph Straus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
  66. For an overview, see R. Pfeifer and J. Bongard, How the Body Shapes the Way We Think (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006);
  67. and Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991).
  68. Carl Stumpf, Tonpsychologie (Leipzig: Hirtel, 1883), 1:vi.
  69. See for instance Uexku ¨ll's comparison of two-part counterpoint and "factors [in Nature] that together form a unit," in A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 172, 79. "Unsere ganze Ko ¨rperorganisation ist nach dem Prinzip ho ¨render und to ¨nender Orgelpfeifen aufgebaut. Das will besagen, dab wir aus lauter individuellen Ganzheiten bestehen, von denen jede ihr eigenes Gesetz besitzt." Uexku ¨ll, Die Lebenslehre (Potsdam and Zurich: Mu ¨ller, Kiepenheuer and Fu ¨ssli, 1930), 71.
  70. Uexku ¨ll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 48, 171, 202-3.
  71. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1967; Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), 19.
  72. This principle of experimental psychology-when people "consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity"-applies typically to numerical values in experiments, but there is no reason to restrict the principle it Music and the Transhuman Ear 251
  73. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/100/2/199/4951391 by guest on 07 July 2023 espouses to numbers. See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (London: Penguin, 2011), 119-28.
  74. "Wir Extropianer wollen nicht normal sein, wir wollen supernormal sein, super- gesund, superstark, superintelligent." From Max More's interview with Gundolf Freyermuth, in Cyberland: Eine Fu ¨hrung durch den High-Tech-Underground (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1998), 201.
  75. Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, 1:viii. See also Don Ihde's argument for a philosophy of listening as the "hope to find material for a recovery of the richness of primary experi- ence," in Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York, 2007), 13.
  76. Robert Ranisch and Stefan Sorgner, eds., Post-and Transhumanism: An Introduction (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014), 7.
  77. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1983), in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (1987; Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000), 73.
  78. He defined transhumanism as "philosophies of life . . . that seek the continua- tion and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life- promoting principles and values." Max More, "The Philosophy of Transhumanism," in The Transhumanist Reader, 3.
  79. "Transhumanist Declaration," The Transhumanist Reader, 54-55.
  80. See Sean Cubitt, "The Sound of Sunlight," Screen 51, no. 2 (2010): 118-28;
  81. and John M. Picker, "The Tramp of a Fly's Footsteps," American Scholar 71, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 85-94. I am grateful to Carolyn Abbate for drawing these articles to my attention.
  82. Carolyn Abbate, "Sound Object Lessons," talk given at the 4th Music and Philosophy Conference, 2014, Kings College, London, revised for JAMS 69 (2016): 793-829.
  83. Nick Bostrum, "The Tranhumanist FAQ," Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, ed. David Kaplan, 2nd ed. (Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 346.
  84. Bostrum, "Why I Want to Be Posthuman When I Grow Up," in The Transhumanist Reader, 28.
  85. Bostrum, "The Transhumanist FAQ," 347.
  86. The eight characters have absurdly humanistic names: text, pretext, context, heterotext, mythotext, paratext, metatext, and postext. Ihab Hassan, "Prometheus as Performer," Georgia Review 21 (1977): 830-50, at 843. Hassan acknowledged the term posthumanism as a "dubious neologism," but anticipated the transhumanizing process not as a sudden change but as a natural part of being human, a condition that combines "Imagination and Science, Myth and Technology." It began with the discovery of fire by prehistoric "man," he asserts; that is, with the mind of Prometheus (835).
  87. Among the scholarly literature, two representative contributions would be Donna Haraway's seminal essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1983);
  88. and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
  89. Coole and Frost, "Introducing the New Materialisms," 10.
  90. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 286.
  91. Translation adapted from Foucault, The Order of Things, 387.
  92. Alexander G. Weheliye, "'Feenin': Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music," Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 21-47, at 21. My thanks to Griff Rollefson for bringing this to my attention.
  93. Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 76.
  94. Braidotti optimistically anticipates a "technologically mediated post- anthropocentrism [that] can enlist the resources of bio-genetic codes, as well as tele- communication, new media and information technologies, to the task of renewing the Humanities." Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 145.
  95. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948).
  96. Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Brunswick: Westermann, 1877).
  97. Accounts that cite Kapp as the originator of the field of Philosophy of Technology include Friedrich Rapp, Analytical Philosophy of Technology, trans. Stanley Carpenter and Theodor Langenbruch (Doderecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1981), 4;
  98. Frederick Ferre ´, Philosophy of Technology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 10;
  99. Peter Fischer, "Zur Genealogie der Technikphilosophie," in Fischer, ed., Technikphilosophie (Leipzig: Reclam, 1996), 309; Thomas Zoglauer, "Einleitung," in Zoglauer, ed, Technikphilosophie: Texte (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2002), 9; Marc J. de Vries, Teaching About Technology (Doderecht, Berlin, and Heidelberg: Springer, 2005), 68; Gu ¨nter Ropohl, Allgemeine Technologie (Karlsruhe: University of Karlsruhe Press, 2009), 13.
  100. "eine Organprojektion oder die mechanische Nachformung einer organischen Form." Kapp, Grundlinien, 71. The book drew broadly on an Aristotelian techne-the ability to make (something) that depends on correct awareness of, or reasoning about, the thing to be made-and more specifically on Democritus's view of technology as the imitation of nature, in which human house-building and the craft of weaving were first invented by imitating swallows building their nests, and spiders weaving their webs, respectively.
  101. Kapp, Grundlinien, 93. The most widely accepted instance of organ projection, one that Kapp cites simply as "obvious," is that between the nervous system and net- works of telegraphic communication that were established throughout Europe and North American during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This Music and the Transhuman Ear 253
  102. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/100/2/199/4951391 by guest on 07 July 2023 parallel-asserted by such respected academic physiologists as Du Bois Reymond, Helmholtz, and Werner Siemens-serves to authenticate Kapp's substantialist con- ception of organ projection: "Nerves are cable installations of the animal body, tele- graph cables are human nerves. And, we might add, so must they be, for the characteristic feature of organ projection is the unconscious occurrence." (Die Nerven sind Kabeleinrichtungen des tierischen Ko ¨rpers, die Telegraphkabel sind Nerven der Menschheit! Und fu ¨gen wir hinzu, sie mu ¨ssen es sein, weil das charakter- istische Merkmal der Organ projection das unbewußte Vorsichgehen ist) (141). For a detailed discursive study of the parallelism between nerves and networked telegraphic cables in nineteenth-century Germany, see Laura Otis, Networking (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
  103. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop- Young and Michael Wutz (1986; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
  104. The classic text is McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), where he argues that with electronic communication technology "we are extending our central nervous system itself in a global embrace." Media, he continues, are effectively metaphors that "translate experience into new forms" and he prophe- sies a dominant culture of electronic data transfer accordingly: "By putting our physi- cal bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls . . . will be translated into information systems" (3 and 57).
  105. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 189.
  106. Ibid., 16. Emphasis added
  107. Brian Massumi, for one, proposes that "things and objects are literally, materi- ally prosthetic organs of the body" in Parables for the Virtual, 96.
  108. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 283.
  109. Six years before Claude Palisca published his famously positivistic definition of "American Scholarship in Western Music" (1963), the American intellectual Dwight Macdonald launched a related critique: "We want to know how, what, who, when, where, everything but why." Rolling his eyes at the practice of weighing criminals be- fore and after execution, he saw in its quest for different weights an emphasis on data and a lack of theory: "We are obsessed with technique, hagridden by Facts, in love with information . . . our scholars-or more accurately, our research administrators- erect pyramids of data to cover the corpse of a stillborn idea." See Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011), 208, 203. More recent resistance to a posthuman philosophy include complaints from computer scien- tist David Gelernter, for whom a "roboticist" worldview has well-nigh become "a so- cial disease" that adheres to a "fatally flawed" analogy between mind and software.
  110. See Gelernter, "The Closing of the Scientific Mind," Commentary Magazine, 1 January 2014, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific- mind/.
  111. Nick Bostrum locates its origin in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, ca. 1800
  112. BCE, in which King Gilgamesh learns of, and seeks, a natural means for attaining immortality-via a seabed dwelling herb-but is thwarted by a snake. It is thereafter traceable across a densely spun web of historical documents, from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Frances Bacon to Nietzsche and Aldous Huxley. See Bostrum, "A History of Transhumanist Thought," see http://www.jetpress.org/volume14/bostrom. pdf. Tendencies toward genealogy are ever present, and though Bostrum avoids asserting specific links between Nietzsche's € Ubermensch and transhumanism, others have affirmed continuities. See, most prominently, Stefan Sorgner, "Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism," Journal of Evolution & Technology 20 (2009): 29-42.
  113. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3.
  114. Ibid., 284. Emphasis added.
  115. In 2003, Joseph Auner diagnosed how vocoder and computer simulations of voices play on the associations of mechanical and organic sounds in songs by Radiohead and Moby. Far from deconstructing the human, these present songs as "a sort of cyborg system that attempts to splice the human and technological thus . . . illuminat[ing] its peculiar expressive character." The ensuing anxiety of identity is embedded in the manipulation of vocal signifiers within a continuum of human and synthetic computer sounds. For Auner, the resulting cyborg persona "becomes a way of reconstructing expression," which is to say, both a topos of pop culture and a refer- ential language. Joseph Auner, "'Sing It for Me": Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music," Journal of the Royal Music Association 128, no. 1 (2003): 98-122, at 110-11. See also Frances Dyson, The Tone of Our Times (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2014), 70ff; and Stefan Sorgner's loose composition-based speculations, "Music" in Ranisch and Sorgner, Post-and Transhumanism, 299-314; and Sorgner, "Music, Posthumanism and Nietzsche," The Agonist 5 (2012): 1-26.
  116. This extends from Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer (1965) and Raymond Kurzweil's Brain-Generated Music to the Brain-Computer Music Interface developed at Plymouth University, UK. Whereas Lucier's approach was to amplify al- pha waves, creating a signal to excite loudspeakers attached to percussion instru- ments, Brain Generated Music Interface analyses the electrical activity in the Brain (via electroencephalography) and converts the signal into music played on a MIDI keyboard. An overview is given in Eduardo R. Miranda and J. Castet, Guide to Brain- Computer Music Interfacing. Kurzweil describes BGM as a "brain-wave biofeedback sys- tem" whose stated purpose is to encourage "the generation of alpha waves [associated with meditative states] by producing pleasurable harmonic combinations upon detec- tion of alpha waves, and less pleasant sounds and sound combinations when alpha de- tection is low." See his description in The Age of Spiritual Machines, 152. An analysis of Lucier is given in Volker Straebel and Wilm Thoben, "Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer," Organised Sound 19 (2014): 17-29.
  117. Salvatore Sciarrino, "Di una musica d'oggi," Chigiano. Rassegna annual di studi musicologici 33 (1979): 371-75, at 371.
  118. Sciarrino, notes from Hermes in L'Operer per Flauto (Milan: Ricordi, 1984), 7. 122. The literature on virtuosity has grown considerably over the last decade. On the question of paradoxical identities, see particularly Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford: University of California Press, 1998);
  119. Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
  120. Richard Leppert, "Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso," in Three Hundred Years of Life with Piano, ed. James Parakilas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 252-81.
  121. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, 94.
  122. "Gliss. senza stringere la posizione! Sino alla fine della corda!" Salvatore Sciarrino, Sei capprici (Milan: Ricordi, 1976), 11.
  123. Officially, thresholds of audibility are calculated in laboratory conditions as the smallest level of sound pressure needed for an individual to perceive a certain fre- quency. They are plotted as the thresholds in decibels (sound pressure level: SPL) ver- sus frequency (Hz). Of course, the auditory system remains insensitive to some frequencies no matter how intense the sound. Values are calculated through psycho- metric testing where subjects are deemed to have heard a tone if they correctly detect it 75 percent of the time. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) pub- lishes data for the audibility thresholds of "ontologically normal persons" 18-25 years old. See document ISO 28961:2012 here https://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx? sku¼ISOþ28961%3a2012 http://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx? sku¼BSþISOþ28961%3A2012.
  124. A crescendo leads to a peak dynamic ranging from PPP to FF, before a diminu- endo. Typically for Sciarrino, the passage into silence is specified by a circle at the head or tail of each pair of lines, as the preface explains: "Crescendo dal nulla / dimin- uendo fino al nulla." Sciarrino, Sei capprici, 1.
  125. Aristotle, de Anima, Book 2, 424a, ll. 28-32.
  126. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 100.
  127. Salome ´Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 167.
  128. Brenden P. McConville, "Reconnoitering the Sonic Spectrum of Salvatore Sciarrino," Tempo 65 (2011): 31-44, at 32. See also Gavin Thomas, "The Poetics of Extremity," The Musical Times 134 (1993): 193-96.
  129. Sciarrino, "Entretien avec Salvatore Sciarrino," Entretemps 9 (1990): 135-42, at 139. 132. Per Nørga ˚rd's comment cited in Anders Beyer, "Om Nørga ˚rd 5. Symfoni," Dansk Musik Tidsskrift 3 (1990-91): 75-81, at 81.
  130. Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds, 170. Imagining inaudible sounds becomes a metaphor in Voegelin's reading for political open-mindedness. She moralizes that the possibility is always there, and that "we need . . . the [idea of the] inaudible, to become able to imagine the as yet unimaginable and let it infiltrate actuality."
  131. Ernst, Sonic Time Machine, 30.
  132. The ultrasonic pitches, though calculable, are not determined as such. Directions in the score explain: "2 'dog whistles,' poss. high pitched (together produc- ing deep difference tone by ff)." Nørga ˚rd further requests that players take "great care . . . to maximize the 'overall production' of difference-(beat)-tones" by adopting stable tone quality, before the two whistles outlast the chord proper and a general pause on the rest clears the altitudinous sound. The second and final appearance of the whistles hears their difference tones emerge as the sole sound from within a sustained chord of dissonant semitones, struck fff and slowly detuned via quarter tones in a descending glissando. Nørga ˚rd, Fifth Symphony (Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen, 1991), 53, 57.
  133. Anders Sandberg, "Morphological Freedom: Why We Not Just Want It, But Need It," in The Transhumanist Reader, 56-64, at 56.
  134. Enhancements already underway include an implantable compass that vibrates when facing magnetic north; see http://www.cyborgnest.net and the auditory stream- ing of digital sound to a Nucleus 7 cochlear implant; see http://www.hearyourway. com/wps/wcm/connect/uk/n7/adults. Others include decreases in age-related muscular decline, AIDS and cancer prevention, DNA repair, as well as "possible cognitive enhancements." See Sandberg, "Morphological Freedom," 58. See also Gregory Stock and John Campbell, eds., Engineering the Human Germline (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and in the field of biochemistry, Migliaccio, Giorgio, Mele, Pelicci, Reboldi, Pandolfi, Lanfrancone, and Pelicci, "The p66shc Adaptor Protein Controls Oxidative Stress Response and Life Span in Mammals," Nature 402 (1999): 309-13;
  135. Tang, Shimizu, Dube, Rampon, Kerchner, Min Zhuo, and Tsein, "Genetic Enhancement of Learning and Memory in Mice," Nature 401 (1999): 63- 69.
  136. Max More, "A Letter to Mother Nature" [1999], in The Transhumanist Reader, 449-50, at 450.
  137. Mark Reybrouck, "Adaptive Behaviour and Epistemic Autonomy," Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice, ed. Ire `ne Delie `ge and Geraint Wiggins (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 2006), 44.
  138. The distinction between medical treatment that enhances function rather than ameliorates an illness, has been regarded as fuzzy by philosophers in this context. Witness Carl Elliott, who argues that what seem to us like straightforward examples of medical treatments "will look differently to people from other times and other pla- ces, and . . . the line we often draw between enhancements and treatments is not as sharp as we would like to think." Elliott, "What's Wrong with Enhancement Technology?," in Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, ed. Kaplan (Plymouth, UK: Routledge, 2009), 431-37, at 435.
  139. Joe Myers, "5 Human Enhancements That Could Be Commonplace by 2020," https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/5-human-enhancements-that-could-be- commonplace-by-2020/.
  140. One example is the Interactive Music Awareness Programme (IMAP) based at Southampton University, UK. See http://morefrommusic.org.
  141. Douglas McCreery of Huntingdon Medical Research Institute has pioneered this method for patients with type 2 Neurofibromatosis (NF2), where a tumour along the auditory nerve leaves it without function after surgery to remove the tumour. See McCreery, "Cochlear Nucleus Auditory Prosthesis," Hearing Research 1 (2008): 64-73.
  142. See Figure 1 in Barbara A. Goldstein, Abraham Schulman, and Martin L. Lenhardt, "Ultra-High-Frequency Ultrasonic External Acoustic Stimulation for Tinnitus Relief," International Tinnitus Journal 11(2005): 112. See also K. Fujimoto, S. Nakagawa, and M. Tonoike, "Nonlinear Explanation for Bone-Conduction Ultrasonic Hearing," 210-15; and T. Nishimura, S. Nakagawa, T. Sakaguchi, and H. Hisoi, "Ultrasonic Masker Clarifies Ultrasonic Perception in Man," Hearing Research 175 (2003): 171-77.
  143. By contrast, commercial headphone manufacturers have developed bone- conduction technology for normative hearing ranges as a means of bypassing the ear- drum, but this ceases to function beyond normative thresholds. One example is AudioBone: http://www.audioboneheadphones.com.
  144. See Mark A. Parker, "Biotechnology in the Treatment of Sensorineural Hearing Loss: Foundations and Future of Hair Cell Regeneration," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (2011): 1709-31.
  145. For theorists of virtuality such as Massumi, the discovery of aesthetic stimuli in newly accessible objects would not constitute an "authentic" reach into the world of supersensible sounds. Adapting his critique of sensation, any technological extension of the cochlea duct's acuity points to the virtual: "Sensation and thought, at their re- spective limits as well as in their feedback into each other, are in excess over experience: over the actual. They extend into the nonactual [what cannot be perceived]. If the al- ternative mode of abstraction into which perception extends is the possible, the in- tense mode of abstraction into which sensation potentially infolds is, at the limit, the virtual." Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 98.
  146. Michael Chorost, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (London: Souvenir Press, 2005), 147.
  147. Mills, "Do Signals Have Politics," Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 319-39, at 334.
  148. Graeme Clark, "The Development of Speech Processing Strategies for the University of Melbourne/Cochlear Multiple Channel Implantable Hearing
  149. Prosthesis," Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology 16 (1992): 95-107, at 95. See Mills, "Do Signals have Politics," 331-33.
  150. Mills, "Do Signals Have Politics," 323.
  151. See Mills, "On Disability and Cybernetics," Differences 22 (2011): 74-111; and Neil Harbisson's TED talk, "I listen to colour" https://www.ted.com/talks/neil\_harbis- son_i_listen_to_color/transcript?language¼en.
  152. A concise summary of aesthetic and scientific approaches to "underwater music" over the past half century is given in Stefan Helmreich, "Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science." See particularly Nina Eidsheim's cri- tique of underwater singing, "Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing and Listening," in Sensing Sound, 27-57; and Douglas Kahn's intellectually playful Noise-Water-Meat (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 242-89.
  153. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 99.
  154. Eisuke Yanagisawa's album Ultrasonic Scapes (2011) sold out of its initial re- lease of fifty copies, but is available as a digital download: http://www.gruenrekorder. de/?page_id¼5260.
  155. See Thomas Talavage, Martin Sereno, Jennifer Melcher, Patrick Ledden, Bruce Rosen, and Anders Dale, "Tonotopic Organization in Human Auditory Cortex Revealed by Progressions of Frequency Sensitivity," Journal of Neurophysiology 91 (2004): 1282-96.
  156. Chorost, Rebuilt, 174.
  157. In 1999 Rainer Klinke et al. demonstrated a seven-fold increase in the brain size of congenitally deaf cats whose auditory nerves received electrical stimuli (via neural implants) from a microphone; the implant was connected to a microphone, ef- fectively creating a prosthetic ear that allowed the hitherto deaf cats' functioning au- ditory nerve to "hear." See R. Klinke, A. Kral, S. Heid, J. Tillein, and R. Hartmann, "Recruitment of the Auditory Cortex in Congenitally Deaf Cats by Long-Term Cochlear Electrostimulation," Science 285 (1999): 1729-33.
  158. Postulated military applications include "implanted computing and communi- cation devices with new interfaces to weapons, information and communications" while business applications would seek "expanded information transfer capacity." See G. Q. Maguire and Ellen M. McGee, "Implantable Brain Chips? Time for Debate," Hastings Report 29 (1999): 7-13, at 9.
  159. Stockhausen's comment is cited in Robin Maconie, Other Planets (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 145; Carr was a graduate student in Physics at Cornell at the time of the nanoguitar's invention. See: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/ 1997/07/worlds-smallest-silicon-mechanical-devices-are-made-cornell.
  160. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (1969; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), xlv.
  161. See Stelarc's own account on his website, http://stelarc.org/?catID¼20242.
  162. An introduction to Nucleus 7 is given here https://cochlearimplanthelp.com/ tag/nucleus-7/.
  163. John Koetsier, Forbes, 26 July 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 2017/07/26/icyborg-apple-just-announced-the-first-mass-market-cyborg-enhance- ment/. I am grateful to Alexander Rehding for drawing my attention to this.
  164. Stelarc's own account of the "extra "ear" project is here http://stelarc.org/? catID¼20242.
  165. To an extent, ventriloquizing an illusory voice inside one's head externalizes the function of Theodor Reik's figurative "third ear," that of unconscious psychoana- lytical intuition, in Listening with the Third Ear (New York: Farrar, 1948).
  166. Stelarc, 1982 interview, in Obsolete Body, ed. James. D. Paffrath and Stelarc (Davis CA: JP Publications, 1984), 17.
  167. Stelarc, "From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-Human Entities," The Cybercultures Reader, 457.
  168. Jane Goodall, "The Will to Evolve," in Stelarc: The Monograph (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005), 1-32; Andy Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs, 115-42.
  169. Stelarc, "From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems," 458.
  170. Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), 52.
  171. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (1958; London: Thames & Hudson, 1962), 112ff.
  172. Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, 18, 151.
  173. Rudolph Ko ¨nig's term for imagined ultrasonics at the time.
  174. That Chorost's device only just achieved parity with his earlier auditory envi- ronment (hearing aids) doubtless colors this cautious conclusion. Chorost, Rebuilt, 175, 177.
  175. Ibid., 174.
  176. Vivian Sobchack, "A Leg to Stand On," in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 21, 38.
  177. Bernard Williams, "Two Faces of Science," Essays and Reviews 1959-2002 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 48.
  178. Cochlear Implants, Charles Graser Papers, 921-HSG, 1961-1995 Collection, John Q. Adams Center, Quincey, MA; cited in Mills, "Do Signals Have a Politics," 329-30.
  179. For an example of this argument, see Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Can Thought Go On Without a Body?," in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (1987; Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000), 129-41, at 132.
  180. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species [1859], 6th ed., ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 142.
  181. Gary Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music (New York: Zone, 2015), 296.
  182. Don Ihde, speaking of a "postphenomenology" in which digital mediation ren- ders accessible male mice singing courting songs and the changeable cycles of whale song, reflects in similar vein that "the possibilities of musics not yet heard . . . are far from exhausted." Ihde, Listening and Voice, 264.