Conference CFP: Musical Materialities in the Digital Age (original) (raw)
Sound as Musical Material. Three Approaches to a Material Perspective on Sound and Music
In: Papenburg, Jens, Holger Schulze (Eds.): Sound as Popular Culture. A Research Companion. Cambridge, MA: MIT press 2016, p. 53-64., 2016, 2016
Is music made of elaborated melodic and harmonic structures that must be retraced through conscious listening? Or is music an initiated affective process derived from the forces of (acoustic) vibrations? How we answer these questions about the "primary material of music" is essential for the role that media technology can play in musical contexts. Even if we adopt the Solomonic approach of "on the one hand but on the other," we will usually also make some form of judgment that is informed by musical aesthetic traditions of thought. The paper discusses three approaches to 'material': The Sonic, Traditional Notation and - borrowing some thoughts from Th.W.Adorno - "Musical Material".
Music and the Materialisation of Identities (2011)
Journal of Material Culture, v. 16, n. 4, pp. 1-13
How does music materialize identities? This article argues that music is instructive in conceptualizing the materialization of identity because it opens up new perspectives on issues of materiality, mediation and affect. These perspectives are intimately related in turn to music's plural socialities, which necessitate a novel approach to theorizing the social. Music, it is proposed, demands an analytics that encompasses four planes of social mediation; while these socialities, with other forms of music's mediation, together produce a constellation of mediations -an assemblage. All four planes of social mediation enter into the musical assemblage: the first two amount to socialities engendered by musical practice and experience; the last two amount to social and institutional conditions that afford certain kinds of musical practice. The four are irreducible to one another and are articulated in contingent ways through relations of synergy, affordance, conditioning or causality. By adopting the topological metaphor of the plane to stand for distinctive socialities mediated by music, the intention is to highlight both their autonomy and their mutual interference. The second half turns to genre theory to suggest that analysing genre in terms of the mutual mediation between two self-organizing historical entities illuminates both how social identity formations may be refracted in music, and how musical genres can entangle themselves in evolving social formations. Finally, with reference to music's capacity to create aggregations of the affected, the article considers the efflorescence of theories of affect, association and entrainment. While such theories illuminate the generative nature of the mutual mediation between musical formations and social formations, they are limited by lack of awareness of the four distinctive planes of music's social mediation, as well as the significance of their autonomy and their contingent interrelations for understanding how music materializes identities.
The Poetics of Electrosonic Presence: Recorded Music and the Materiality of Sound
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2003
The properties and possibilities of music recordings remain surprisingly undertheorized despite recorded music's ubiquity in contemporary musical life and the increasing attention technologically mediated musics have received from researchers in a variety of disciplines. In this essay, I propose that by taking recordings seriously as cultural objects and abandoning assumptions about their "inauthenticity", we can gain new insights into the multiple roles music plays in social life. Three basic questions structure what follows:
Music & Material Culture Programme (2016)
2016
Under what forms and ways can Music, in its materiality, be embodied? A part from bodies, voices, performances, sounding devices and written notations are the main forms of material heritage at our disposal. Music collecting developed really from the Renaissance when Music printing and Musical Instrument Making became activities regulated by specialized trades and guilds. Music lovers established ensembles of books and instruments for different purposes: to use, to study, to enjoy, to manifest power, to symbolise culture and identity.
Architectures of Emptiness Musical Sources the Digital Derive and the Senses
With this paper I investigate the relationship between musical sources, modern and postmodern archiving technologies for archiving and repercussions on the sensuous experience of such musical artefacts: how the utilization of physical sources such as books, scores, manuscripts, vinyls and tapes has changed with the advent of digitalisation and online databases; how visual and tactile exposure to physical sources has been drastically modified by what philosopher Vilem Flusser calls ‘technical images’; how distinct and diverse personal relationships with physical sources of input have been progressively neutralised, standardised and perhaps even equalised by the introduction of digital devices, impersonal objects with multifarious performative purposes. Moreover, I examine epistemological and ontological implications of the emergence of contemporary sources of input that arise from programs which are exclusively digital, fully absorbed in the domain of the virtual, existing only in the realm of binary numbers, ephemeral virtualities (engraving and editing software suites for audio and video production, digital photography, design, tridimensional rendering, etc). I will investigate how proliferation of such sources impinges on the domain of the sensuous and on the social fabric, altering our very notion of history, chronology, tradition. Finally I will suggest futurabilities, pathways and methods of study for evaluating musical sources, and in doing so, I bring into play Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel, Elias Canetti’s masterpiece Auto da Fé, and the ancient Chinese divination text I Ching.
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.
Musicality as material culture
Adaptive Behavior, 2018
From an enactive perspective, one should be able to explain how perception and actions, constituted in patterns of interactions with the world, evolve into the capacities for social coordination and social understanding distinctive of human beings. Traditional accounts of our social understanding skills, focusing on the role of intentionality as the ''aboutness'' associated with the use of symbolic language, make this sort of explanation difficult to articulate. A satisfactory explanation should start with the recognition that intentionality is not a monolithic phenomenon and that more basic kinds of intentionality embodied in material culture have played a crucial role in allowing for the complexity of human social cog-nition. We argue for the importance of kinds of bottom-up intentionality, which arise from the world as it is experienced , dynamically structuring and directing our cognitive capacities toward possibilities of (joint) action. Musicality (our capacity for being musical) is a particularly rich kind of cultural expression, in which intentionality embodied in material culture can be studied and its significance for the structure of our deeply social cognition can be explored.
2019
Theorists and musicologists have asked what particular musical works mean, what particular musical objects represent, what they narrate or disclose, and how those meanings got there. Recently, some thinkers have jettisoned music-language parallels in favor of investigating music’s ineffability, its sensuous effects, and the materialities of its performances. However, both routes of inquiry, whether sympathetic to the music-language analogy or not, rest on assumptions about the concept of meaning itself. Both typically ground the music-language analogy in the semantic aspects of language meaning—how language repressents, refers to, or discloses the world. If meaning and semantic representation are conflated, music’s efficacy—which exceeds its representational modalities—becomes, dissatisfyingly, the other of its meanings. This project challenges the status of representation in conceptions of the music-language analogy, developing an alternative foundation for understanding musical meaning from philosopher J. L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances.” Austin and other thinkers in a tradition now called “ordinary language philosophy” rejected the view that language meaning is chiefly a matter of how it represents states of affairs or states of mind—its constative dimension. The performative dimension of language, however, names the ways words and sentences are used to accomplish semiotic actions and produce effects. This concept grounds language meaning in the efficacy of language use in social praxis. In Chapter 1, I develop an analogous theory of musical meaning, grounded in the semiotic actions and effects produced by music as utterance. Music is often said to be, if anything, expressive; but expression—strictly speaking, the mapping of inner content to outer signifying form—is a weak conceptual basis for what we think of when describe music as expressive. Instead, conceiving of music’s meaningfulness in terms of its efficacy as sonic utterance supplies the condition of possibility for musical expression, reference, and disclosure while also eliminating the false dichotomy between music’s meanings and its effects. In Chapters 2 through 4, drawing on fieldwork at European festivals of new music including the Darmstadt Summer Courses and Donaueschinger Musiktage, I explore works by four living composers and sound artists: Michael Beil, Peter Ablinger, Stefan Prins, and Ashley Fure. These works exemplify what I call an aesthetics of efficacy, and their meanings centrally involve the performance of communicative actions such as: the incitement of particular modes of listening, the construction of narrative identities, and the enactment of changed attitudes through musical sound and story. For instance, Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2016) is a musical engagement with the problems of the Anthropocene. Through the lens of performative utterance, I characterize it as an ecocritical intervention. Fure’s work creates an abstract narrative that seeks to bring out a sense of the vibrancy and animacy of the non-human objects that star in the piece: vibrating speaker cones, percussion instruments, and elements of the mise-en-scène. Fure aims to incite listeners to leave the concert space with stronger senses of empathy and productive anxiety towards the vibrational events of the Anthropocene, including fracking-induced earthquakes or the calving of glaciers into warming oceans. The encouragement of empathies and incitement of anxieties towards the planetary ecosystem are highly salient aspects of the piece’s meaning, and these are, fundamentally, semiotic actions performed by musical sound. To fully probe performative utterance and understand its value for musical study, we must expand beyond the study of art music to investigate music in contemporary social life. Like scholars who have used Austin’s work to investigate the injurious efficacy of hate speech, I turn to examine the ethico-political stakes of the performative utterance concept, theorizing music’s potential to become injurious utterance. In Chapter 5, I critique tendencies to frame discussions concerning music as violence in materialist terms, and expose some shortcomings of this materialist, vibrational model. In Chapter 6, I conduct an observational cyber-ethnography of web forums for adult entertainers and their patrons, showing how both groups discuss strip club music’s capacity to elicit erotic dance and facilitate forms of sex work that take place in adult entertainment establishments. I argue that, for victims trafficked into strip clubs, music’s efficacy surpasses its prompting and facilitating functions, becoming the semiotic enactment of sexual violence. Music functions contextually to induce behaviors that promote precarity and rob victims of sexual agency, prompting striptease and lap dances as well as the forced solicitation of commercial sex within grossly uneven power differentials. The final chapters offer a corrective to the admittedly attractive view that music is inherently personally and socially therapeutic, arguing that such thinking is ideological and politically inefficacious.
Technology and Music Education in a Digitized, Disembodied, Posthuman World
2014
Digital forms of sound manipulation are eroding traditional methods of sound development and transmission, causing a disjuncture in the ontology1 of music. Sound, the ambient phenomenon, is becoming disrupted and decentred by the struggles between long established controls, beliefs and desires as well as controls from within technologized contexts. I posit that music technologies are reshaping concepts of time and space, and digital mastery now appears to be the valued musical knowledge. It is necessary to consider a new paradigm for what it means to be musical-in-the-world. Virilio suggests that, rather than being democratic, technology “has hijacked democracy in a mediatized, claustrophobic world” (2005, 339), contributing to a posthuman condition through the destruction of embodied experience.