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Books by Brian Kane

Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere beyond, holds a privileged place in... more Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend, the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music, listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds, employing various techniques to isolate sounds from their sources. With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music.

Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word, "acousmatic" was first introduced into modern parlance in the mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer's ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Kane investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological perspectives -- historical, cultural, philosophical and musical -- and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising and paradoxical ways that unseen sound has been understood. Finely detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseen pursues unseen sounds through a stunning array of cases -- from Bayreuth to Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to Zizek, music and metaphysics to architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present -- to offer the definitive account of acousmatic sound in theory and practice.

The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer's theory of "acousmatics," Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the history of the senses.

Papers by Brian Kane

Current Musicology, 2008

Peter Szendy's first translation into English has appeared on the shelves not merely by chanc... more Peter Szendy's first translation into English has appeared on the shelves not merely by chance. It arrives in the wake of two recent trends in the academic world: an intense interest in all things having to do with the history and culture of the senses, and the sudden accession of Jean-Luc Nancy as the Academy's philosophe du jour. Of course, these two trends are not unrelated, for few philosophers have questioned the senses, especially the sense of touch, in the way that Nancy has over the past two decades. Nancy's foreword to Szendy's book is guaranteed to draw attention to the new release, especially coming immediately on the heels ofFordham's translation of Nancy's short volume, Listening. Its "positioning" couldn't be better. However, unlike the terse, Heideggerian-inflected prose of Nancy, Szendy's work appears far more sober. At first glance, it is little more than a piecemeal work, centered around three topics: a sketchy history of m...

Contemporary Music Review, 2017

While the ontology of musical works is a venerable theme in the philosophy of music, works of cla... more While the ontology of musical works is a venerable theme in the philosophy of music, works of classical music have been the primary focus of study. This essay displaces that focus by considering the ontology of musical works in relation to jazz ‘standards’. Responding primarily to realist conceptions of musical works for performance, the essay outlines an emergent, non-essentialist, network-based ontology of jazz standards. By focusing on two key operations—replication and nomination—a philosophical and musicological argument is presented where ‘work-determinative’ properties are shown to be sufficient but not necessary. Under this concept, works are corrigible and subject to mediation. Not only do subsequent performances change the nature of the work, the very act of ‘replication’ (or musical reproduction) requires social mediation. After presenting the argument, a series of broad contrasts are drawn between the network-based concept of musical works and the realist view.

RESONANCE, 2021

Broadcast from Havana, Cuba, but intended for audiences in the United States, Radio Free Dixie wa... more Broadcast from Havana, Cuba, but intended for audiences in the United States, Radio Free Dixie was the work of the civil rights leader Robert F. Williams. Airing from 1962 until 1966, the program carefully used music, news, and commentary to convey a militant message of armed self-defense and a critique of American imperialism and racism. While most scholars have focused on William's spoken commentaries, this article aims to reconsider the role of music on Radio Free Dixie. By examining playlists transcribed and identified from archival broadcasts held at the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan, the article explores three themes. 1) The playlists draw attention to the care with which the music for Radio Free Dixie was selected and how phonograph records were acquired while in Cuba. 2) When viewed through the lens of parrēsia, or what Michel Foucault theorizes as the act of "truthtelling," the playlists facilitate an argument about how music and speech co-constitute Radio Free Dixie's parrēsiastic subject by isolating particular moments in the broadcasts where the truth-telling occurs at the intersection of music and speech. 3) Consideration of special episodes given wholly over to music allows for an examination of musical genres employed on Radio Free Dixie and their degrees of overt and coded utterance. Finally, the article considers what it might mean to make militancy audible.

New German Critique, 2016

This paper discusses how Adorno's work at the Princeton Radio Research Project represents less a ... more This paper discusses how Adorno's work at the Princeton Radio Research Project represents less a novel engagement with the American culture industry and more of a continuation of his philosophical projects. Adorno's radio work both prolongs his critique of phenomenology and introduces his concept of physiognomy.

Twentieth-Century Music, 2017

This article considers the relationship between audiotape's material affordances and the audibili... more This article considers the relationship between audiotape's material affordances and the audibility of cultural practices. Not all changes in the materiality of sound media are audible to listeners, and not all changes in the audibility of cultural practices require changes in their material support. Thus focus on the affordances of sound technologies-those possibilities of sound technologies that may or may not be engaged by its users, and the wide range of practices that such technologies support-can help to connect materiality and audibility. I address the affordances of audiotape by examining a number of small case studies where established sonic practices encounter a transition from phonography to audiotape: musique concrète and the tape loop, serialist composition, and Les Paul's use of overdubbing. Finally, I consider the nature of the audiotape archive and its mode of access in order to pose some general questions about the meaning and use of audiotape's affordances.

Sound Studies, 2015

It has been nearly a decade since Michele Hilmes published her review article 'Is There a Field C... more It has been nearly a decade since Michele Hilmes published her review article 'Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does it Matter?' 1 In the decade since, no one can deny that sound has captivated the imagination of scholars across many disciplines. Alongside the publication of numerous articles and books on sound and listening, there has been a steady stream of anthologies, such as Michael Bull and Les Back's Auditory Culture Reader, Veit Erlmann's Hearing Cultures, Jonathan Sterne's Sound Studies Reader, Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld's Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, and Routledge's four-volume Sound Studies. 2 These volumes, like all anthologies, delineate a canon of texts, organize topics, ABSTRACT 'Sound studies' and 'auditory culture' are terms often used synonymously to designate a broad, heterogeneous, interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Yet a potential disjunction between these terms remains. Some scholars within sound studies, by turning to the ontology of sound and to the material-affective processes that lie 'beneath representation and signification' , reject auditory cultural studies. In this essay, I consider the 'ontological turn' in sound studies in the work of three authors (Steve Goodman, Christoph Cox, and Greg Hainge) and offer a few arguments against it. First, I describe the Deleuzian metaphysical framework shared by all three authors, before addressing their particular arguments. Then, I consider Goodman's vibrational ontology. While Goodman claims to overcome dualism, I argue that his theory is more rigidly dualist-and poorer at explaining the relation of cognition to affect-than the cultural and representational accounts he rejects. Next, Cox and Hainge's aesthetic theories are considered. Both are proponents of onto-aesthetics, the belief that works of arts can disclose their ontology. I argue that onto-aesthetics rests on a category mistake, confusing embodiment with exemplification. Because of the confusion, Cox and Hainge slip culturally grounded analogies into their supposedly culture-free analyses of artworks. Finally, I reflect on the notion of an 'auditory culture' , and suggest the 'ontological turn' in sound studies is actually a form of 'ontography'-a description of the ontological commitments and beliefs of particular subjects or communities-one that neglects the constitutive role of auditory culture at its peril.

No story is more ubiquitous in electro-acoustic music than the tale of the Pythagorean veil. It i... more No story is more ubiquitous in electro-acoustic music than the tale of the Pythagorean veil. It is recounted again and again when electro-acoustic musicians find themselves in the situation of justifying why they use this strange term, “acousmatic, ” to describe their music. Schaeffer, in the canonical version of the story from the Traité des objets musicaux, claims that acousmatic refers to the “name given to the disciples of Pythagoras who, for five years listened to his teachings while he was hidden behind a curtain, without seeing him, while observing a strict silence. ” (Schaeffer, in AC, 76). Variations on this theme abound, with different degrees of completeness and for a variety of highly differentiated but

Current Musicology, 2013

I. Listening can only be localized in the ear by force of reduction. Imagine a room (call it the ... more I. Listening can only be localized in the ear by force of reduction. Imagine a room (call it the "music room"), in which sounds are heard; any normal person entering the room is presented with sounds which are audible only there, but which can be traced to no specific source ... A specific sound--middle C at such and such a volume, and with such and such a timbre--can be heard in the room. Yet there are, let us suppose, no physical vibrations in the room: no instrument is sounding, and nothing else happens there, besides this persistent tone. (1) The "music room" is a hypothetical. To function, it requires the force of reduction. This is most apparent in the claim that, "let us suppose," these sounds are correlated to no physical vibration. That moment authorizes the philosopher to distinguish the sonic from the musical: one vibrational, with everything that comes in tow, such as the acoustic, the resonant, the spatial, and the causal; the other, a pure...

Organised Sound, 2007

The work of Pierre Schaeffer (theorist, composer and inventor of musique concrète) bears a comple... more The work of Pierre Schaeffer (theorist, composer and inventor of musique concrète) bears a complex relationship to the philosophical school of phenomenology. Although often seen as working at the periphery of this movement, this paper argues that Schaeffer's effort to ground musical works in a ‘hybrid discipline’ is quite orthodox, modelled upon Husserl's foundational critique of both ‘realism’ and ‘psychologism’. As part of this orthodoxy, Schaeffer develops his notion of the ‘sound object’ along essentialist (eidetic) lines. This has two consequences: first, an emphasis is placed on ‘reduced listening’ over indicative and communicative modes of listening; secondly, the ‘sound object’ promotes an ahistorical ontology of musical material and technology. Despite frequent references to Schaeffer and the ‘sound object’ in recent literature on networked music, concatenative synthesis and high-level music descriptors, the original phenomenological context in which Schaeffer's...

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2012

Current Musicology, 2008

Reviewed by Brian Kane Andy Hamilton's Aesthetics and Music is an unusual concoction: one part hi... more Reviewed by Brian Kane Andy Hamilton's Aesthetics and Music is an unusual concoction: one part history of the aesthetics of music, one part review of recent work in the Analytic philosophy of music, and one part original contribution to musical aesthetics. Published as part of Continuum's new series of introductory texts on art and aesthetics, Hamilton's book is more than a student text and less than a specialist's essay. Three historical chapters-which quickly survey the musical aesthetics of ancient Greece, Kant and the nineteenth century, and Adorno and modernism-alternate with philosophical chapters that treat some recalcitrant problems in a more sustained manner. These latter chapters-titled "The Concept of Music;' "The Sound of Music;' "Rhythm and Time;' and "Improvisation and Composition"-contain the substance of Hamilton's thinking. They also revisit ideas originally developed in the

This paper expands a model for voice studies first proposed in the colloquy, "Why Voice Now?" (se... more This paper expands a model for voice studies first proposed in the colloquy, "Why Voice Now?" (see below). It is published in a recent issue of Polygraph.

‘Sound studies’ and ‘auditory culture’ are terms often used synonymously to designate a broad, he... more ‘Sound studies’ and ‘auditory culture’ are terms often used synonymously to designate a broad, heterogeneous, interdisciplinary eld of inquiry. Yet a potential disjunction between these terms remains. Some scholars within sound studies, by turning to the ontology of sound and to the material–a ective processes that lie ‘beneath representation and signi cation’, reject auditory cultural studies. In this essay, I consider the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies in the work of three authors (Steve Goodman, Christoph Cox, and Greg Hainge) and o er a few arguments against it. First, I describe the Deleuzian metaphysical framework shared by all three authors, before addressing their particular arguments. Then, I consider Goodman’s vibrational ontology. While Goodman claims to overcome dualism, I argue that his theory is more rigidly dualist – and poorer at explaining the relation of cognition to a ect – than the cultural and representational accounts he rejects. Next, Cox and Hainge’s aesthetic theories are considered. Both are proponents of onto-aesthetics, the belief that works of arts can disclose their ontology. I argue that onto-aesthetics rests on a category mistake, confusing embodiment with exempli cation. Because of the confusion, Cox and Hainge slip culturally grounded analogies into their supposedly culture-free analyses of artworks. Finally, I re ect on the notion of an ‘auditory culture’, and suggest the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies is actually a form of‘ontography’– a description of the ontological commitments and beliefs of particular subjects or communities – one that neglects the constitutive role of auditory culture at its peril.

David Lewin's Morgengruß: Text, Context, Commentary, 2015

My contribution to a new, critical edition of David Lewin's famous but unpublished manuscript on ... more My contribution to a new, critical edition of David Lewin's famous but unpublished manuscript on Schubert's "Morgengruß." In it, I draw out some of the key differences between the manuscript and Lewin's later essay, "Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception."

A colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society on voice studies. My contribution... more A colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society on voice studies. My contribution sketches out a model for thinking about the voice and encourages ways of developing voice studies beyond (what I call) the "Derridean impasse." The colloquy was convened by Martha Feldman, and the other contributors were Emily Wilbourne, Steve Rings, and James Q. Davies.

This essay introduces the reader to Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on listening, by focusing on his use... more This essay introduces the reader to Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on listening, by focusing on his use of two French verbs that both mean ‘to listen’, namely entendre and écouter. By playing close attention to way that Nancy differentiates these verbs, and the historical context in which they have played a role, one discovers an entryway into Nancy’s challenging thinking about sound, sense, and subjectivity. Écouter and entendre are discussed in relation to the phenomenological theories of listening of Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer emphasizes entendre, which is etymologically related to word intentionality, as the privileged mode of listening to the sound object, an intentional object, whose sense is grounded on the closed reference back to the listening subject. Nancy critiques this mode of listening—and the implicit subject posited—by emphasizing écouter, which holds open the threshold between sense and signification. Listening reveals sound as a structure of resonance—an infinite sending and resending. Nancy’s analyses also reveal that resonance is the structure of the subject and of sense.

Current Musicology, 2008

Contemporary Music Review, 2017

RESONANCE, 2021

New German Critique, 2016

Twentieth-Century Music, 2017

Sound Studies, 2015

Current Musicology, 2013

Organised Sound, 2007

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2012

Current Musicology, 2008

David Lewin's Morgengruß: Text, Context, Commentary, 2015

David Lewin’s “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception” is a touchstone for phe- nom... more David Lewin’s “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception” is a touchstone for phe- nomenologically influenced music theory, yet something puzzling remains about the role of perception in Lewin’s phenomenology. On the one hand, Lewin emphasizes the embodied nature of perception by arguing that perception is itself a type of skill, a “mode of response,” which manifests itself in an infinite number of creative acts. On the other hand, he explicitly employs phenomenology in only a limited manner; in Parts I–III of his essay, he sets up his phenomenological “p-model,” and then, in Part V, critiques it as ultimately inadequate for forging a link between perception and creation.
In this essay, I offer a solution to this puzzle by examining Lewin’s sources. I argue that he is indebted to the school of West Coast phenomenology in two respects: (1) that Lewin’s style of phenomenology is influenced by the Fregean interpretation of Husserl, which supports the ontological and categorical split between perceptual sense and reference presented in the p-model; (2) that the general argument presented in Lewin’s essay, which moves from the p-model toward a critique of disembodied percep- tion, is modeled on Hubert Dreyfus’s two-stage argument against Artificial Intelligence.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.