Music, Sound and Space. Transformations of Public and Private Experience (original) (raw)

The Politics of Sound and the Biopolitics of Music: Weaving together sound-making, irreducible listening, and the physical and cultural environment

Organised Sound, 2015

The ever-increasing focus on sound in recent creative practices has ideological implications and seems to reframe and problematise ontological perspectives on music. Today it is possible to contrast notions of music as identical with sound (as in the discursive framework of ‘audio culture’) with artistic practices where sound and music arenot at allidentical, and the usually implicit hierarchy between them is probably twisted. This article discusses such matters from a methodological position that weaves together issues usually discussed in different areas of concern: it understands ecologically informed notions of sound and auditory experience as strictly intertwined with critical and inventive attitudes on technology, particularly as their intertwining is elaborated through performative practices. It suggests that, in music as well as in sound art, what we hearassound andinsound is the dynamics of anecology of situated and mediated actions, as a process that binds together (1) hum...

Doing (things with) sounds: introduction to the special issue

Social Semiotics, 2014

This special issue aims at analyzing music as a site of social semiosis, i.e., at investigating the manifold ways in which music is constituted as a socially shared event. The papers collected here follow three main threads, considered as central aspects of music making: studying the kind of coordination and participation required to make music together; looking at the semiotic resources employed by musicians to construct their roles in interaction; examining the relationship between language and music. A variety of perspectives is adopted, ranging from social semiotics to conversation analysis, anthropology, multimodal analysis, and critical discourse analysis. Such a variety is also reflected in the musical traditions -Western art music, jazz, gospel, church hymns, pop musicand in the settings under examination, which comprise instructional activities like musical classes and rehearsals, as well as ordinary conversations and written accounts of musicians' biographies. Issues of epistemicity and authority, intersubjectivity, correction of musical action, solidarity, and ideology are thereby addressed. The issue thus aims at exploring the richness and complexity of music making as a social practice, and documents how the integration of different disciplinary perspectives can offer fruitful insights on music as a domain of sociality which lies at the intersection of aurality and writing, norm and creativity, individuality and collectiveness.

Musically Human-Made World. Possibilities for Recomposing and Creating a Human World Through the Activity of Music

Synthesis philosophica, 2016

This paper offers an interdisciplinary account and a reflection of the interconnections and relations among music, human life, and the world. With the intention to present the possible ways of defining music, two approaches are examined. These approaches are "musicking" and the disjunctive strategy of understanding music, both of which provide a descriptive and not an evaluative account. After a brief acknowledgement of music as a means for political propaganda, and as a means belonging to the sphere of mass production and conformism, the other side of music is to be presented mainly through the concept of "community music", where the unconditional welcome of striving towards the impossible and the infinite responsibility towards the other makes music universal exercise in ethical gestures, openness, and acceptance.

[Syllabus] SS.490.05 [SS.235P] The Sociology of Music/Sound/Noise

Bulletin description of the course: SS.490.05 Special Topics. This course examines everyday life through our experience of music, sound, and noise. Because the field of the sociology of music is as broad as the world of sound, we will focus on the production, meaning, use, and construction of soundscapes and auditory environments. Individual or group soundscape projects will be accompanied by readings that together will provide students with a foundation in active critical listening and the sociological study of music, sound, and noise. The course will require a good deal of listening to perhaps unfamiliar music and musical genres, but you do not need to be able to read music or play an instrument for this course. Detailed description of the course: SS.235P Sociology of Music/Sound/Noise This course examines how we understand everyday life through our experience of music, sound, and noise. Because the field of the sociology of music is as broad as the world of sound, we will focus on the production and meaning of just a few of the many styles of music around the world, from Charles Ives to Funkadelic. We will use these musical studies to then delve into the use and construction of soundscapes and auditory environments. Finally, the course will study the social and environmental effects of noise, as well as the use of silence and noise in music since Anton Webern, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhuasen, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Brian Eno, and Robert Fripp. The course will require a good deal of listening to perhaps unfamiliar music and musical genres which will be accompanied by readings that together will provide students with a foundation in the sociological study of – and active critical listening to – music, sound, and noise. You do not need to be able to read music or play an instrument for this course. Course Goals To introduce students to the relationship between music, sound, and noise in terms of our social relations, our enjoyment or annoyance, and the experience of music/sounds/noise in relation to the production of the spaces and landscapes of everyday life.

Sound/Society/Subjectivation: Epistemological Consequences of Sound Studies for Musical Analysis (Music in the Prism of Sound Studies, International Conference, 24-26 January 2019, EHESS Paris)

2019

The aims of this paper are three: (1) To explain the structure of my epistemological critique of traditional musical analysis and draw its consequences, (2) to show how a musical analysis that focus on a sonic praxis and aims to generate knowledge on and through music can benefit from sound studies and (3) to outline the program of musical analysis as the analysis of sonic mediated processes of subjectivation. The structure of this paper is the following one: In the first part I'll explain the method of my epistemological critique of musical analysis and draw its consequences. I hope to reveal problems of musical analysis and show the motivations for, if not the necessity to, transform the concept of music and the purposes of analysis in mainstream musical analysis. In the second part I'll discuss two key concepts of sound studies from which musical analysis can benefit: Relationality and Materiality. I argue here that musical analysis should involve the analysis of a historical, cultural and media specific sonic praxis, in which techniques and technologies are constitutive to what music is. In the third part I'll outline my project of musical analysis as the analysis of sonic mediated processes of subjectivation.

Music and Society - The Modern Era

At the end of the 19 th Century composers faced a crisis of creativity. The question was; how to produce original melodies, from a tonal system that seemed to have exhausted its potential of making original melodies and forms? What precipitated this situation, and how composers of the 20 th century rose to the challenges posed to the tonal system, is the subject of this essay. In this analysis I will argue, that the aesthetics of these alternatives have shaped the relation of orchestral

The construction of music as a social phenomenon: implications for deconstruction

Canadian University Music Review, 1990

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How the Performer Came to be Prepared: Three Moments in Music's Encounter with Everyday Technologies (2022)

Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies, 2022

What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. 1 It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher's table: "an assumed background on which one writes." 2 Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. 3 More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, 4 serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. 5 So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was "complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity" 6-and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. 7 From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage's 'prepared piano,' I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency.