Figures in Air:
Multiplicity and Aurality as Social
by
b
re
Archi
IS
~MASSACHUSETTS
Frc~
OF TCNLG
Micah Silver
B.S. Music
Wesleyan University 2002
3RARIES
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN
ART, CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY
AT THE
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
JUNE 2013
@2013 Micah Silver. All rights reserved.
The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce
and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies
of this thesis document in whole or in part in any
medium now known or hereafter created.
Signature of Author:
._
_.
Micah Silver
Department of Architecture
June 10, 2013
Certified by:
Azra Aksamija
Assistant Professor of Art, Culture and Technology
Deparment of Architecture
Thesis Supervisor
Accepted by:
Takehiko Nagakura
Associate Professor of Design and Computation
Chair of the Department Committee on Graduate Students
1
E
THESIS COMMITTEE
Azra Aksamija
Assistant Professor of Art, Culture and
Technology
Florian Hecker
Lecturer in Art, Culture and Technology
Johannes Goebel
Professor of Arts and School of Architecture
Director, Experimental Media and Performing
Arts Center
Renssealer Polytechnic Institute
FIGURES IN AIR
by
Micah Silver
Submitted to the Department of Architecture
on May 10, 2013 in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Master of
Science in
Art, Culture and Technology
ABSTRACT
These texts can be understood as potential
documentation of my activities from 2002-2012.
They can also be read as a constellation of
theoretical statements relating to:
art, music, thinking, economy, being,
governance, psychology, music cognition,
audio, diagrammatics, speculation, technology,
governance, models of utility, logics of
construction, systems theory, utopianism, sound
studies, multiplicity, animal communication,
pseudo-science, correlationism, theories of
body, sound art, learning, everythingism, form,
musicology, philosophy, poetry, philosophy of
science
These texts can also be understood in relation
to productions documented on the Internet's
World Wide Web and accessible via a browser/
compiler at: http://www.nophones.org
Thesis Supervisor: Azra Aksamija
Title: Assistant Professor of Art, Culture and
Technology
3
A Proposed Continuity
Speaking With Temporary Tongues
Ambiences
Essays Will Not Save Us
Listening Beyond Turing
Audio's Ancestrality
Is Audio A Thing?
Figures in Air
Beyond Blinking Binary
Why Time-Based Art Takes Time
Time-Based Formal Imaginations After Minimalism
Schematics Toward Multiplicity
A Black Hole That Consumes All Doubt
Post-Script Speakeasy A Diatribe Softly Spoken
Speaking With Temporary Tongues
A preface should only be written when one knows the thing being prefaced
Ambiences
... the problem is that we don't trust reason. Reason
is the capacity to be stupid - to not understand
why it should be like that and not otherwise; to
not understand why this philosophy is true rather
than the other one. For me, all philosophies are the
construction of one possible world, why this one
ratherthan that one, etc. You never really understand
what you speak about when you think that to think
is to posit necessity - there is no necessity.
Postmodernist culture has been simultaneous, feathered,
overlayed beyond irreconcilability; chaotic perforation, and
somehow absolute. Readings of the what emerged out of
Modernism and into multiplicity and coyly described as simply
"Post-That" have had a "bulging overcoherence." This is how
Steven Connor diagnosed his own, 1989 monograph at the
time of its republication nearly a decade after.2
As an escape from placing any date on these translations and
to align it with future concerns of these texts Postmodernism
can be understood as a period of time in which a cultural shift
away from the belief that we could know the world in any
other way beyond through how we represent it to ourselves
(as opposed to knowing anything intrinsic about the world or
its contents). Modernism can be understood as containing the
permissibility to mix the two. What's most interesting in these
epochal definitions is why so many people desired these shifts
in thinking, how they manifest, erupt, and transform.3
Growing up in the post-industrially fossilized culture of the
rural Northeast, the population was not regionally, nevermind
globally mobile. The houses are too far apart to make cable
Q Meillassoux/F. Hecker/R. Mackay, "Q Meillassoux/F.
Hecker/R. Mackay Conversation at Chez Meillassoux, Paris, 22.7..2010."
(Urbanomic, July 22, 2010).
Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of
the Contemporary. 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 1997. ix
2
Gary Aylesworth, "Postmodernism," in The Stanford
3
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 2013
11
television profitable nor are their enough subscribers for the
phone companies to profit from an upgrade to their lines.
MTV (and the consumer media consolidation of the 90s)
existed elsewhere, as there was never any variety to be found
on the radio to begin with. We were still in Braxton's Trillium
R singing along: "give them variety! give THEM var-i-et-ty!"
Except we were hoping for it without paradox.4
If postmodernism was a voice, Barthe's grain was no closer than
any other imaginary or the possibility of digging a hole to china.5
My experience of the 8os and early 90s was quietly empty
of the simultaneity and rupture descriptive of Postmodernism
and how I would describe my experience since leaving the
quiet behind. Yet, the multiplicity of the postmodern does not
exclude the Modern's existence simultaneously; somewhere
or anywhere. Nor those inhabiting any strand of the multiple
arriving to or ever encountering awareness of the other planes.
Via Brian McHale's Postmodern Fiction, Connor concludes that
the defining feature of literature in this time has been to build
narratives of autonomous, possible worlds whose relations and
boundaries are questioned (e.g. Murakami) - this contrasts
with Modernist literature that employed compositional strategies
to explore the conundrum of how to know, and how a reader
can experience that knowing via the time-based experience of
encountering the text's construction (e.g. Stein).6
Perforations and interplays between worlds seep outward from
spoke-like locations or facilitated by technologies. Slowly the
option for quanta to pass, bu it is still desire that will take one to
be elsewhere. The difference between 1986 and 486 BCE is that
Herodotus's travel were his own, only he could understand his
relationship to fiction, speculation, or reportage in constructing
history. If we accept Postmodernism as perceptually real in any
sense, we accept that everyone is an equivalent historian of the
Braxton, Anthony, Trillium R: Shala Fears For The Poor 4
Composition No. 162 (New York, NY: Braxton House, 1996), http://
tricentricfoundation.org/label/braxton- house/trillium -r-shala-fears-forthe-poor-composition-no-162/.
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, vol. 6135 (HarperCollins
5
UK, 1977).
6
Composition here should be understood as the structuring of
attention in time, regardless of which sense or combination the attention
is focused through.
time, and from our collective discomfort with not being told
our place in history, we have decided that to crowd-source it,
wiki it. Yet the stronger move in the face of this time's collection
of paradox is to accept the that awareness, knowledge of what
lies beyond the perforation is not the problem it was. "Raising
awareness" is of little use. The utility of considering what isn't
correct or real history has vaporized into the infinitude.
A feature of early PoMo phases that is likely not to bring about
any challenge is a quality of fracture that seeped across most
cultural territories. The magma of globalization was cause for
alarm and dissent - the WTO protests (remember?) - until
its exponentially hastening arrival ceased to feel anymore like
becoming and without notice somehow arrived.
Simultaneously, we experienced the tides of new medias,
modes of communication, technologies, unified as a global
design economy; many thresholds crossed and crossing each
other, all toward an increasing sense that globalization that had
quietly bloomed and into a species we hadn't anticipated. We
thought: "perhaps we missed the real fight?" Occupy the heart
of the matter, but where can we find it? How can we touch it?
From this fracturing haze emerged new constructions of time,
of space, of place, and most subterraneanly of the balance
between being and knowing in our lives and in conceptualizing
the new definitions for "information" and an information
society.7 The tectonic-ongoingness of the fracturing gave time
for people to ask themselves and their friends how to put things
back together, which only obscures the deeper insecurity: this is a
wholeness I don't understand.
Post-modernity's multiplicity forces a refraction of familiar
constitutions of unity into "parts-of parts"' for which there
has been much theorization. Do you remember, maybe it was
1999, when everyone was reading about chaos theory like they
See the following text for a thorough examination of how our
7
current information society arrived and its implications: i. The Control
Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information
Society (Harvard University Press, 1986).
8
Judd, Donald. "Specific Objects." Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 1959-
75.
13
had discovered the most underground, radical, and ecstatic
band? We've clamored again and again to comings-together
around new notions of singular unity, but why?
The multiplicity alluded to was first tasted on the wind during
the mid-6os can be credited to the Civil Rights Movement
in general, but in particular via the Black Power component.
The schismatic impact of Black Power on White America's
sub-conscious and conscience is still unfolding, fracturing
the artifacts of scientific/religious basis for dehumanizing
categorization. We can hope that as a culture we are moving
toward every individual being understood as having a related
brain and potential slice of the neurodiversity. But first, this
post-6os schism will need to undo the subliminal legacy of
Darwin's theories supporting White Power (or explicitly in its
utility for Eugenics and Nazi Germany). We forget that Darwin
wrote de-humanizingly by about human beings in The Descent
of Man:
Thus the weak members of civilised societies
propagate their kind. No one who has attended to
the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of man9
Darwin's ideas of weak and strong gave every field a stab at
constructing a "key" in hopes of discovering THE schematic
for being or identifying a strong human. And one more aside
that is apropos to the essays to come, the iconoclastic modernist
thinker G.K Chesterton's view on all this, a tremor of what has
emerged and is critiqued differently by the Speculative Realists
(writing in 1922):
The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through
government is Science. The thing that really does use
the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really
is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed
that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment,
the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons
Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, (1871): 168 -169. Note:
Darwin's utility for the Eugenics Movement and Nazi concepts of racial
purity is not in dispute - however, the interpretation of Darwin's words
very much is. My use is contingent on his word's utility, not a statement
of interpretation. See the following for an ongoing debate over a
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:NotableCharles_
Darwin-misquotes#eugenics andDarwin andDarrow
9
but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by
policemen-that creed is the great but disputed
system of thought which began with Evolution and
has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our
established Church;for the government will really
help it to persecute its heretics.. .I am notfrightened
of the word 'persecution'...Itis a term of legalfact.
If it means the imposition by the police of a widely
disputed theory, incapable offinal proof-then our
priests are not now persecuting,but our doctors are.'
Unlike post-war Modernity, where we can trace a radical, deconstitutive attitude across social movements and disciplines,
post-modernity
unfolded
differently. Deleuze
posited
the
Rhizome and emergence became a strain of imagining the future.
Technopositivists like
Thomas Friedman posited that the
"world is flat" due to technology - the heyday of informational
democracy and therefore educational and economic democracy.
Many artists, academics and designers joined this particular
banter and produced broadly with the idea that network culture
was the next era to imagine ourselves entering." In different
fields we heard about various "turns", as if to describe the
topography of a rhizomatic
flow: the performative
turn,
ethnographic turn, speculative turn, sensory turn . . . we can
name endless possible "turns" and let us hope they all can exist
together.
Baudrillard
and
Lyotard were
wise in their overlapping
assessments that a distinction from the past was that we can no
longer expect a "next" era or "end" to history- that the notion
of progression in any stretch of cause and effect had been
ruptured." While both focused on larger-scale socio-political
visions, a consequence on a smaller scale, and where Art,
Culture, and Technology" is concerned is that the competitive,
argumentative framework for cultural production (including
theory) has become out of step.
10
Chesterton, G. Gilbert Keith. Eugenics and Other Evils: An
Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State. Inkling Books, 2000.
i
(Friedman 2006)
12
See: (Baudrillard 1994) and (Seidman 1994) Chapter i
13
Art, Culture, and Technology is a graduate program at MIT
15
What matters for cultural production is the extent to which it
can provide temporary truths for the visitor to that information,
tried on as if a costume, tested for its learning-potential within
that visitor's frame, and utilized in whatever way is possible.
Simultaneously, we have witnessed the necessity to overcome
the ambivalent relativism of the center-left and left throughout
the 90s and oos and arrive at a convicted and perhaps reckless
relationship to establishing ways of knowing, being, and arriving
that lead from all directions to all directions: multiplicity.
The hegemony of reconcilability; the illusions we created
to categorize and exclude and construct a security from
false-unities represented in tremendous pseudo-diversity via
Capitalism. These reinforce what we think is our self and our
position amongst these categories. But this logic has sprayed
into a thousand and has evaporated in utility. The safari is over
and it is only we who can, for ourselves, decide what that
means. Nations, corporations and other globally active entities
will certainly proliferate safari-logics into the distance future.
"From now on friendship is political"" is one of the most
relevant phrases in recent years and is perhaps this is useful to
consider; to consider what a friend is becoming.'"
My projects over the past ten years have been functioning
within the framework of this multiplicity, described differently
at different times. But the impulse has always been to bring
about fields of representation and presences across a spectra
of internal relations. This has been a mode of working that
affords a visitor the simplest option: to consider it as purely
fragmentation- but this option or question is precisely the
location of the work. What constitutes wholeness? Why look
for one? How much can we accommodate into a whole? How
quickly can we recenter or re-entrain, binding a new sense
of unity? Can we accept irreconcilable multiplicity as a class
of possible unities? As we move from patterns we believed
we understood to those we struggle to grasp, we have other
options: we can fearfully cling to schemas we have inherited or
choose vectors into multiplicity and infinitudes.
14
Tiqqun, CALL, publisher unknown
Here we should not focus too much on Facebook's effects, but
15
rather what desire it enables us to manifest in time and where that desire
emerges for us
On this journey I will critically engage the argumentation in Seth
Kim-Cohen's text In the Blink ofan Ear" as an articulation of the
resistance just mentioned. Meillassoux's text After Finitude" will
be used as an excavator throughout the thesis. I read the text
several years after many of the notions explored here emerged,
but his penetrating argumentation digs beneath my own work
and has proved an invaluable tool for burrowing into much of
the dogma proliferated within sound studies writing proper and
our understanding of audio.
I've placed Jan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy as a lighthouse and
attempt to live up to her definition: "Philosophy is thinking
in love with clarity,'"" though I make no claim to be a
philosopher. I don't live with a job description, I'm just here to
demand poetry and "polydimensionality"" within the areas of
thinking and doing that I've invested most of my time here on
planet Earth exploring. These texts are a notch in one of many
doorways and mark time as accumulation requiring downpour.
Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear
16
Sonic Art. 1st ed. Continuum Pub Group, 2009.
Meillassoux, Quentin, Alain Badiou, and Ray Brassier. After
17
Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Continuum, 2010.
Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy (Univ of Toronto Pr, 1992)-32
18
19
Ibid. Pg.8
17
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How to Play Croquet
or
Chains of Possible Continuity
A roll through the arc of texts or the coming hours:
I will extend from the discussion above to an exploration of
where we can articulate audio's thingness via a relocation of
audio in a partial framework of Quentin Meillassoux's concept
of ancestrality. Breaking stride with much of the recent literature,
I am not focusing on the inscription of sound, but rather with
audio as it becomes typologies of representation as air that
makes possible an ephemeral social architecture. To accomplish this
I will sketch the history of sound diffusion for large groups of
people, which takes us just before the personal audio overtake
via the Sony Walkman and requires, lucky for the reader who
gets that far, a special focus on disco.
From there to an engagement, more or less a response to Seth
Kim-Cohen's recent and influential book In the Blink of an Ear.
This book has been a turning point in the academicization of
artistic productions focused on sound and listening, beyond the
cultural container of "music." We'll use this text as prelude to
the essay "Time-Based Formal Imagination After Minimalism"
which moves our conundrum-hopping to semi-conscious
aspects of artistic production and the near-hegemonic hold of
the "linguistic turn" and its defensive dualism. Kim-Cohen's
text is in part important in that it imports argumentation from
the Minimalist paradigm into the present - legitimizing "sound
art" and to some extent "sound studies" as a field- but our
concern is in what is lost as part of this translation. We'll try
to locate a desert of question marks in relation to the field
of cultural production's own version of correlationism, again
returning to Meillassoux's ideas as a linguistic fracking device.
21
I'll suggest ways to think aboutform in the absence offormalism
proper, and explore in brief two notable, distinct and resistant
practices that existed before, through, and after minimalism.
We'll then trace the idea of schema from Piaget through music
cognition and perception research, to artificial intelligence
and present-day psychological theories. This will be used as a
beacon to locate the utility of art in the space of learning under
a particular definition where all learning is predicated on the
presence of friendship or unconditional love. By doing this, we'll
try and escape the current rhetoric of research and knowledge
production often indistinguishable from design, entertainment,
exceptions to reality, and essay- a strategy endangering the
arts already marginalized position. We are gambling on
appropriating the rhetoric of quantifiable utility used by the
education industry without the necessary tools to prove the
results of such production or research-based experimentation
found in quantitative disciplines such as science and engineering.
And one last note, which is warmly offered as a parry to doubt
that may come: contrary to what some may find for themselves,
this whole enterprise is entirely a function that intends to reason
without a care toward truth. Future daydreams with reason of
their own is what this is all about. That said, you break it you
own it.
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I
Essays Will Not Save Us
If an artist tackles a subject with practical urgency, such as
a pressing humanitarian crisis, the formalizing impulse often
becomes fixated on communicating within what the author
believes would be a maximally direct syntax. This syntax can
widely be reduced to essay-like documentary formats in any
media, following requisite dramatic thesis, argumentation,
and conclusion. An "essay" in this sense is a language-based
informational display which we've come to understand as
having intrinsic and generalized communicative value and
authority.
But for all the essays written in text, and essay-like videos and
films, music, and other media, humanity is still in a desperate
situation.2 o Seemingly, the kind of awareness and information
absorption-to-action that can be engendered through this
medium has not saved us from violence, starvation, resource
and currency wars.
I would never contend that any communication modality
can be expected to accomplish these things - but I make this
statement as a reality-check for the implicit rightness of raising
awareness as the justifying outcome of an artistic response to
crisis, which we might consider as not the state of exception but
the daily average.
This logic underpins much of activist practice on both small
and large scales and has had tremendous results: the HIV/
AIDS Awareness movement in the 1990s is a good example,
the rate of new infection has decreased significantly. But the
21st Century has redefined the information landscape to such
an extent that we need to consider whether 20th Century
strategies apply in the same forms and to more fundamental
social shifts that can address desperation's roots.
Essay-like manners of informational presentation are quite
20
A "desperate situation" in this context means our inability
to confront and eradicate basic survival needs for living creatures on
the planet, within a social construction that affords some reasonable
possibility of these creature's desires or impulses to be met within the
community or the freedom and possibility to safely exile.
unlike the experience of time or the human experience of
place. Imagine how one would walk through a forest in order
to follow such a structure of argumentation - how could you
listen to or perform this structure?
Where it does occur in our daily experience is in the description
of machine-like processes such as making a cup of coffee. But
why do we attempt to communicate deeply with each other
by way of machine-like logics of order? What do we lose by
thinking of communication in these terms without tremendous
dissonance or double-consciousness?
Events in our lives do seem to unfold as sequence, and most
cultures remaining on the planet generally agree that we
experience time as passing.The ubiquity of a quantization system
enacted by a clock that literally counts integers in sequence
indicates this to be the case. But we have no shared measure
or language to describe speed, density, or intensity within this
flow. Yet, the experience of ornately structured passages of time
is perhaps the most basic format of experience (if we can even
really speak of format for something as impossible to observe
with philosophical distance).
We should consider the hegemony of popular formal logic
and time-based information structures (such a text) as a major
limiting factor in communication. We should be open to the
possibility that different formats are capable of engaging and
activating new modes of awareness and for the information
presented the modality offers entirely different cognitive
imprints and possible actionable informations for the visitor.
These residual trace elements are what culture is built with.
We can imagine much more layered approaches that contain
an "awareness of alternative"" " forms of experience and
learning- constellational or diagrammatic model of meaning
making. A visitor is invited to engage with a space that is
filled with information and the possibility to navigate through
21
Hans Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning
Cannot Convey, 1st ed. (Stanford University Press, 2003). io6
22
Gumbrecht has an extremely simple definition of consciousness
which can be understood as a backdrop for assertions in these texts for
multiplicity as a necessary precursor to expanding consciousness.
25
it, engaging with both the material and the formal logic of
the work. Something very specific can be extracted from an
experience without expense to a concurrent awareness of
alternatives to this specificity.
This is composition. Materials become voices in a complex
counterpoint of possible responses that places the visitor in
the position of reconciling into a whole. Its an exploration
of dynamics between things and possible relations. This is a
critical, social position that an artist can take: not to drag the
viewer through their work as if reading an essay, but leaving
space for breath, for considering, and for a melding between
the inner forms of cognition that the visitor builds themselves
if they choose to attach their flow of attention to productively
navigating a relationship with the work (whatever that means
at the time).
For artists concerned with what is now called social practice,
or think of the visitor and their relationship, this element,
the reciprocity between inner and outer imaginaries is
often overlooked. If art wants to be an essay and produce
transformations in knowledge and action, then we should
believe that essays can save us. They occasionally have - but
just as often they have lead us astray- and in which category
they fall is always a question of belief. Essays are like guided
dreams or a trip to the thrift store in search of a jacket that
fits - we try them on and look in the mirror. Sometimes we
imagine ourselves wearing them forever; they seem perfect in
the moment. But if we stay open to what is possible, they wear
out and we find ourselves in another dream, in another jacket,
dreaming of an alternative whose presence we sense but can't
yet identify.
In every moment we can find a temporary truth to dream
through, to look at ourselves in the mirror with: the prosthesis
of imagination. An objectification of memory."
The notion of audio as an objectification came out of a
discussion with Johannes Goebel, composer and Director of the
Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy NY in March
23
2013.
AGENT
RECIPIENT
TARGET
IME
LOCATION
Iwill buy you beautiful flowers tomorrow at the flower shop.
Listening Beyond Turing
The sense a listener may have that an originating momenta duration -transfers into their present from another time
when listening to audio is a function of our imagination, not
a property of a technology. The ongoing universality of this
fiction as indivisible from our listening experience also isn't
made more or less imaginary given the fidelity of the audio to
the actual duration of creation. We should consider whether the
status of the audio is even best understood as a reproduction
or a representation of this supposed origin. Why do we even
believe that audio is an artifact that arrives to us from a pastand requiring even more hesitation should be our trust that this
past existed at all, regardless of whether it would be possible
to represent it, never-mind reproduce it. We use the words
recording and reproduction with audio technologies, without
having a clear idea of what exactly is recorded and could be
reproduced. To excavate these questions in hopes of locating a
more concrete and conscious relationship to these possibilities
of understanding is the purpose of this essay.
As we listen to audio, we imagine an authorial human presence
and deduce from the existence of this presence that what we
are hearing is in some way, however small, a human testimony
to the existence of an Earth and of a humanity that we know
something about. We can believe that audio are telling us
something about this humanity."
We never can exclusively hear sound, as we might say a
microphone without consciousness does, we always listen, and
while listening is the resonant interface to the world via the
ear, the ear does not simply hear it also speaks- it representsand is immediately subject to our mind. Rational listening is
synonymous and indistinguishable from the imaginary- and
both are inseparable from memory."
24
Audio will be treated as a countable plural noun. The paper
will explain this use as it unfolds.
Q Meillassoux/F. Hecker/R. Mackay, "Q.Meillassoux/F.
25
Hecker/R. Mackay Conversation at Chez Meillassoux, Paris,
22.7..20r ."(Urbanomic, July 22, 2010).
29
An example, also an exception: We are holding an object whose
function is a temporal displacement. Let's say it is a reel of
magnetic tape or a shellac disc- as tangibly physical as audio
has been, and no longer is. The metals of the tape have been
shaped just moments before along the path of our own voice,
the disc cut into a topographically ornate spiral of valleys that
trace the movement of our lips. But if we aren't holding our
voice in our hands, contained by these materials. What do we
hold?
To understand audio, we need to take great care in unraveling
what, if anything, of our voice, we can believe we are holding,
and gather the plurality of audio's imaginary so as not to confuse
the way we can know, or can hold a voice, or anything else.
Another modulation: as we listen online to a "real-time" feed
of a microphone placed deep underwater- in the oceanic
waveguide where sounds travel around the world, or in
a department store, a live concert stream, or a web cam of
someone's garage: in these cases are we to believe that nothing
originary is transferred across time and space? What do we
believe to know about these places by listening via the remote
microscopy of a microphone? And maybe more important, why
do we desire to believe these things against so many factors
that would dissuade us if we compared these beliefs in-depth
to our knowledge of the mediations present?
In the first case, we could not be there listening in the same
way- with scuba gear we would hear our breathing or in a
submarine, we would hear the machine and listen through
another microphone, but be there in time. For the others,
what is the difference even in how we imagine listening as
we read, in this moment, either by being there or by being
elsewhere, imagining this other "there." Our experience right
now, projecting these examples, can tell us a lot about these
differences- and in many ways, text when used as in this
paragraph can be quite close to the procedures of audio within
our imagination.
Yet the confound to developing a resolution to this possible
similitude of originary and representation is that we can never
be in both locations at once to compare. The differences and the
slope of these discontinuities in meaning with the control of
our own subjectivity, however contingent, is not possible. No
human has experience this. But audio's intersubjective basis, our
implicit social contract around how it means, is clear: we believe
that there does exist some sense of testimony in the experience
of audio that transfers not the entirety of the originating
duration's qualia or even acoustic reality, but something of
it. This something is enough for most of us to have an active
and ongoing relationship to audio that affords it a knowledge
status that we would never ascribe to a photographic image, a
drawing, or even a video. Imageless, we imagine more - and
listening we are vulnerable to suggestion, hypnosis- audio is a
kind of transport, but from where to where and how?
Much has already been written about the history of audio from
the perspective of recording and playback technology, notably
Jonathan Sterne's 2003 book The Audible Past, a turning point
that established "Sound Studies" as a possible interdisciplinary
field between cultural theory, history, and musicology. As
illustrated in his text, the early promotional strategy for sound
recording and reproduction was the claim of preserving the
voice beyond death and in the intrigue of being a listener to the
deceased.2" To de-mystify audio as an idea, different from the
technology of sound recording, we can turn again to Sterne
and see another 19 th century innovation as an antecedent:
embalming.
Audio as in the preservation of a body to be witnessed
postmortem, transforms the loss of the essential features
of "being alive" and creates a preserved physical artifact of
death that functions as a representation of life. Why such a
necrophiliac desire for memory in the absence of a memory's
real? To view a "designed" or embalmed corpse is to construct
an artifact for our imagination and memory to enhance. We
know the corpse is dead and we mourn it and break as we
perceive it, but nevertheless it affords us a momentary option
for a personal transubstantiation of the corpse into imagined
life.2s
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound
26
Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003).289
27
Ibid. 293
28
The earliest remaining recording of Edison's voice is from
31
Given audio originate and develops technologically until the
mid-2oth Century within explicitly Christian societies, the
connection to the Eucharist transform of bread and wine into
the body of Christ is worth a close examination, and in fact
our relationship to audio is much more similar to this than our
relationship to the embalmed loved one. To go further with
this religious backdrop for audio is beyond the scope of what
this essay will attempt, but what is important is to consider that
"audio" as an idea, existed as a schema and a desire, long before
the technology embodied the desire. The origins of this desire
can likely be traced to a Judeo-Christian theological origin.
Regardless of how or why the seed was planted, audio are
tied-up uniquely with our sun-staring relationship with death.
The arrival of the post-death representation via sound and
the sensuality of its unquestionably present and real acoustic
touch short-circuit our criticality. It takes shape for us with
imagination, with fantasy, and with belief. Increasingly some
relate scientifically, technologically (a demand for a specific
encoding, a format preference, a listening situation) how can we relate to audio as a vehicle for observing
relationship to its potentiality, not dismissing the fantastic,
artifactual, the critical, the syntactical, the sensual? This
but
our
the
has
proved difficult for the culture to develop.
Now, back to the tape we hold in our hands containing a
something of our voice. We can likely agree that the duration
we29 experienced while making the recording has entirely
disappeared. This duration is what we felt, how long we felt
it was, the informational crosstalk of our other senses that
influenced our time-sense during the recording, the other
presences in the room, the moments that preceded its effect.
a series of wax cylinders on which he narrates an imaginary journey
"Around the World on a Phonograph." This 1888 recording evidences
Edison's awareness that imagining places via audio was an important
aspect of his technology's potential. Part of the recording can be heard
online: http://archive.org/details/aroundworldonphon1888.
29
Bergson's Matter and Memory, whose particularity about duration,
published in 1896, explores in detail the relationship between sound,
listening, memory, and language - all components of phonographic
experience's cultural transforms.
This aggregate temporality sensed in the moments passing
and remembered as an episode is what is meant by duration.
This experiential unit has nothing but a correlational, linguistic
relationship with the quantization of episodes by a clock of any
system, not only philosophically but practically.
Human beings are terrible at even relating the two without the
ongoing reference to a quantitative device.3 A duration for us,
need not be limited to the clearest case of recording people in
time; it is also the shaping of sound into a duration by a human
being that accomplishes the same thing. So the audio production
studio, in any form, is a means through which durations are
composed. Temporalities are constructed over many episodes,
aggregated into a composite temporality, objectified so it can
then be represented in the future via playback.
So as we listen now to our tape and observe the relationship
between our memory of the original duration recorded and
our unclocked sense of it via the audio representation, we are
left with a somehow related, but additional impression of the
duration. This is an overlay in the most lucid moment, but
quite likely is cause for what Jean Piaget called a deforming
assimilation that we produce via an ego-centric desire to relate
the sameness of our experiences rather than to understand
deeply the difference and construct new schemas for what is
possible based on subtle difference.
We are mutating our memory in this act of listening. And as
we listen, likely we remember not only the duration of the
inscription as an overlay, but others overlay as well. Here we
can turn to Bergson and consider how little choice and control
we have in which memories we recall and for what purpose
our mind identifies them as salient information for informing
the present." We aren't wonderful at controlling what we
remember when we listen, where our senses go- most of us can
barely meditate for a minute holding a single word or thought
without interruption of some memory, anxiety, or curiosity.
30
Brown, Scott W., and D. Alan Stubbs. "Attention and
Interference in Prospective and Retrospective Timing." Perception 21, no. 4
(1992):
31
157
545
- 557
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Cosimo, Inc., 2007). 133-
33
During playback this sensual crosstalk is a new constellation,
we can't remove it from our experience. Even in an anechoic
chamber, a sensory deprivation tank - there is no escaping the
aggregate sensation of being where we are to some extent.
But nevertheless, if the tape machine was calibrated accurately,
we know that a quantification of the originary duration is being
represented during playback with as much accuracy as was
possible during the inscription. That quantity is placed into
a new time, making a new episode of durational experience,
and has regardless of context a spell-like quality that can be
distinguished as a constant amongst other perceptions.
I'
Temporaneity
This quantified fragment of a temporality objectified, an
objectification of memory, is the necessary something that
transfers from the originary moment to the present. We'll call
this temporaneity.
The other information that flows with audio as an artifact is vast
and this definition in no way reduces the density and diversity of
those components. But these are contingent on the durational
relocation described - without this the other components
become ungrounded and singular representations of their own
properties with the mythology of audio- an originary duration
relocated- redacted.
We can prove this to ourselves in a number of ways, depending
on the technology. With digital audio, all we need to do is
iteratively degrade a recording and observe what is left as we
listen to a two bit representation and compare it to a sixteen bit
representation. Timbre and the perception of layers or depth
of sound disappear as the possible dynamic range within the
representation are squashed and become distorted by increasing
noise. What remains most strongly is a beginning, a temporal
gesture marked by sound, and an end. Sixteen bit audio has
65,257 possible values, whereas a two bit representation would
have four. Yet if we compare this one bit representation of our
voice to a one bit representation of a piece of music we know
- the existence of a difference between the two will be clear. In
each there remains a trace of the origins temporality, however
mutated.
If we perform the same experiment in the time and frequency
domain and degrade the sampling rate (the number of temporal
instances or slices of data extracted from a source within given
clock duration) from the common 44,100 samples per second
to iooo samples per second we reduce the possible frequency
range from the full range of human hearing to a maximum
frequency of 454hz (just above the tuning note, A 4 4 o within
the range of most instrument and the voice). If we go further
and lower the sample rate to below 20 samples per second we
37
would begin to hear not a continuity of sound, but a stuttering
pulse of sound with changing spectra limited to 44hz, an
extremely low bass sound. In this stuttering, the representation
of a duration is replaced by a new, rhythmic basis which is
heard as its own duration, even though all sampling rates are
functioning the same way. This threshold between the functional
illusion of a non-quantized representation and a quantized one
is the critical Turing-ish test of audio: it is human testimony if
it is a continuity; even with a lack of spectral realism we will
still attempt to compensate with our imagination toward belief,
especially if a voice.
Technologically we achieved this Turing-passing moment
almost immediately with the phonograph's method of inscribing
a circular object directly spinning it's surface against a moving
blade. Due to this lucky history of invention within the audio
domain, human being were not afforded the same critical
process we've engaged with around Artificial Intelligence and
robotics, for example, and so the necrophilia and imaginary,
the sense of obvious realness that audio brings has gone
unconsidered. Audio's utility is like music, it just seems to be
as we use it.
But I've presented an edge case with some technical background
and "proof" in order to make clear a property that requires
such a differentiation. In this example the voice was ours, we
provide the testimony to ourselves that there was an originary
moment at all. This testimony holds even if the representation
of this past to our senses, played back in a new time and place is
decidedly subject to mathematical transformation whose details
either cross or don't cross important thresholds of believability.
The augmentations we bring via memory and imagination to
this experience of sound, to our translated duration depends
on this belief that another time is being represented. Yet
this testimony is not required for us to sense that there is a
transmission across time; all that is required is a technical
threshold that audio technology has never failed to achieve.'
There have been technological precursors to audio that in
retrospect we can understand as "audio technology" - but at the time
they were understood primarily as tools for automatic writing. See
(Sterne 2003) for a thorough overview.
Note that it is assumed here that timbre carries tremendous
33
32
udr
i20
th
PRESeE
BnrthatfcuGH
e h te
VA FftW
A*1.3
Ro
foMrTW
s
41.5W
amops
CED
Auinorytdionitospsein thessbeun e Beond Bolnin
undrlaytior.i
arguable be created using fans. However attractive and poetic, the idea a
duration-less spectra is a koan impossible to materialize in air.
39
Audio's Ancestrality
We can see that understanding time as divisible into quanta
is the conceptual and technical underlayment for audio. And
while we think of this today as a feature of digital technology,
to imagine it limited to these contemporary resources occludes
grasping the full weight of this rupture.
The ecological historian Alfred Crosby argues that the rapid
transformation of European society from a muddy, diseased
mess into the global superpower it became occurred between
1250 and 16oo. He attributes this transition not to technological
development, but to the rapid adoption of quantification in
domains governing our understanding of time and space.
Europe would be the first region of the world to achieve
"Pantometry" or universal measurement and the embodiment
of these new ways of thinking afforded the paradigm-shifts to
follow across the senses and their disciplinary bodies.
The Islamic world and Asia had long preceded Europe in
inventing systems of measure, but had belief systems that
weren't modulatable through the "glare of clarification"
present in an evolving Europe." For example, the first clocks in
Europe were not constructed until -1270, while water clocks
in various forms had existed in ancient Egypt and developed by
several polymaths in what is now the region between presentday Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Al-Jazari, for example, published
The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices" in
which included numerous mechanical devices that could
execute consistent periodicities, including clocks along with
many other inventions. Beneath even the clock or periodic
machines is the notion of counting reliably. The abacus was
in use in China between 500 and iooo, a period where
-1206
Europeans had no addition or subtraction symbol and were
using "finger reckoning" which was never standardized nor
capable of managing large sums. 6
Crosby, Al fred W. The Measure of Reality: Quantipcation and Western
34
Society, 1250-1600. Cambridge University Press, 1997. 57
Hill, P. Al-Jazari: The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical
35
Devices: Kitdb Fi Ma'rifatAl-hiyal Al-handasiyya. ist ed. Springer, 197 3.
36
(Crosby 1997)
41
So what was the engine that drove a desire for quantification
through music notation, perspective in painting and drawing,
introduced double-entry bookkeeping and moved pre-science
toward science?
Of course there are multitudes of forces, but one is most
intriguing for the dialog that follows: a reciprocal dynamic
between the populist, common sense understanding of the
world and scientific and pre-scientific thinking amongst
specialists increasingly sanctioned by the governing power.
This exchange would shatter what Crosby calls "The Venerable
Model", a contained view of the world that met the needs of
the population's comfort zone for reality's functionality, with
ideas about time and space that were verified as more true, yet
were beyond common sense or empirical investigation.
One lucid example of this is the Copernican Revolution sparked
by Copernicus' 1543 text De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
which informed the public that their planet (and according
to Kant, their subjectivity) was not the center of the universe.
The text contains tables and diagrams incomprehensible to any
non-specialist without expert knowledge of astronomy and
mathematics, two fields few would have had any familiarity
with. Yet it took over two hundred years for his model of
the world to overwhelm the more commonsense view that,
of course, we are the center since there is very little we can
experience with our senses in the absence of science to prove
otherwise.
Thomas Kuhn's text on Copernicus suggests that the reason
it took two centuries was not because the science was in
question, it was due to the tensions and resistance to the
shifting role of subjectivity in relationship to how knowledge is
understood as such. Copernicus' "proof" was of a knowledge
form unverifiable by the population, which aside from direct
transmissions from god or an oracular divination at Delphi, was
an emergent phenomena. 7
Kuhn, Thomas S, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary
37
Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Harvard University
Press, 1957).
Allan Kaprow: There utasonce an art woich wus conceived for the museurrs.and thefacr rha
the museums
past
I
tooklike mausolea may actaiiy reel to us
wOsa form of payin
he attitude we've had to art omthe
respect to the dead Now, I don't know how much morework there
is avoilable from the past that has to be displayed or respected But
if we're gomy to talk about
the wo'rks beirg producedin the lost rewyears, and whch are to be producedor the near future
I
then the conceptof the museumis completely irrelevant. shod lke to pursuethe question of the
'enutronmentof the work of art, what kmodof work is bemngdone now. where it is best displayed
apart fron themuseum, or its rm'ature counterpart.the qlrry
me
tho thereisar attitude that tends ttowardMcLuhaoism,
oirrode iwouldtend to seethe museum as a nut. structure But i ohmk
the nullity imprhed
Robert Smithson: WeI. it seemsto
and
lhis
In the museum is actually one of its rmaor assets,and that this should be tecized and accentu
ated The museun tends
toexcfrde any id of life-jorcmg position Sot
it seri
a tendencyto try to liven things up
to be tending more toward a kr
aspets of a discothequeor.
that now there's
i the museums,and that the wholeidea of/themuseumseems
idof specahzed entertoiment it'srokig on tmo'r andamile the
ess andless the aspects of art So.I thmnkthat thebest thing you can
say about museurris is that they really are nullifying in regard to accon, and I thim that this is orie
of their mjior virtues it seemsthat your posnitn is one that is concernedwitn what s happenmg
Im interestedfor the most part n what s not happerng, that orea betweenevensowhich sold he
Cled the gap his gapeints in the blarik and void regins or settings that ae never look or A
museum devotedto different kinds cf emptinesscoud be developedThe emrptness could he iefired
by the uctual mstataion of art Installations should empty looms, notfill them
Kaprow: Museumstend to make increasingconcessionsto the ideaofar! and life as being related
'What's wrong uth their version of this is that they prouide cannedlife, n aestheicired iliustra
ton of life 'Life~ i the museum is like making lore n a cemteteryi am attracted to tire
Idea
of
dearna out themuseums and letting better designedoneslike the Guggenheim eot assculptures
as works, assuch.almost closed to peopie it would be a positivecommitment to their funcion as
mousolea Yet,such art ac wuld put so many artists out of business
I wonderif there isn't an
alternutive on thefrmngesof rife and art, in that marginalor penumbral zone which you've spoker
so eloquently of,at the edges ofecmes,along vast highways wirth ther outcroppmgs of supermar
hets and shopping centers. endless lumberyords, discount houses,whether that
isrnt
the world
5
rhiro fot yOUat last I meanican you imagmne
yourself workiq it that kind of envirronrment
Smithson: 'm so remotefrom that world that it seemsuncannyto me when I go out there, so not
being directly Involved in the life there, it fascinates me, because 1m sure of a distorce from it.
and I'm all for fbricating as much distance as possible it seemsthat I like to think and
at
look
liing there It'smore
rne Itisthefuture-the Martian landscape Bya distance,Imean a consciousness
those suburbs and thosefringes, but at the same ime, I m not interestedin
of an aspectof
devoid of self-protection.
I thm'. that someof the symptoms as to whars going o in thearea of museumbaildinig
are refiectedsomewhat in Philipgohnson'sunderground museum,which ima sense burtesabstract
I
kinds of art in another kind of abstraction, so that t really becomes a negation of a negation am
ali for a
island
perpetuation of this kind of distacrcmgand removal.and I
is iteristing
hm;
,jtohnsons
projectfor 5s
in that he'sgoing to gut this nteteenth-century buiding and turn
it Into a
ruin. nd he says that he s going to stabihrlethe juins,and he's also buding ti's circular budind
Sch
isreally nothin
but a stabhlized roid And it seemsrhat you jid ho tendency everywhere,
rey wou' Ii/ to b:
tnk, what's oterestoig is te lack
of oaluarce
Whenyou have a Happening.
yourdpn'thave an arbseer of happeningT; er
-ai e is duarsomwhich I'm afraid upsetsa
but everybodyis siul a bit reuctant to gre up then Me-forcinyarudes
or ce them both But, I
lot of ideasof hiumaoismad unity I
reconcited and
thit
tii rto uiews,unity and duaosm. O never be
that both of :hem ore valid, ho!
t'
toe sametime, I preferrie latter im,mplicity
inAiaska,
Kaprow: Thereis another aiternative Youn
f.oid buildmgiyour own monumert,up
pliaps, or Canadoi fte more remoteit wo .
ie the more inaccessibe,perhapsthe sore sorisfac
tory
is
th ru
I
Smithson: We!. tink it
rniely it wc id be
osaprctor
ng for everybodytmcludinog
myself Yet
!,i,, very disappointmentseems to hove possibities
Kaprow: What disturbs me is the tack of extremity in either of our positions For
otten miake social compromises in my Hioppenirgs.while similarly. you and
sance. I must
Oiris
who
eg.
objec to museumsneverrheless go on showimgin them
Smithson: Extrem
tycan exist m ovain cotext too,and Ifind what's vain moreacceptablethan
what's pine It seers to me that any tendencywoord parity alsosupposes rt there'ssomething
to be achieved,and it means that art hassomesort of point Itru I agree with Iauber's irea
that art is the pursuit of the useless,and the more vain thiis are the better I like tibecausetIm
not burdened bv nurinrd
Ancestrality
Quentin Meillassoux's term Ancestrality can help to understand
the cultural position of audio, a "discourse that includes a
temporal discrepancy between thinking and being,"3" and
relates to the Copernican Revolution via audio's capacity to
translate a beyond-death imaginary. This feature of audio
has existed from its arrival and with technical means that for
the general population remain empirically beyond grasp and
conceptually distant. Few can describe in detail the encoding
and decoding of tape, the particularities of a laser "reading"
metal embedded in plastic (a CD) or the signal processing of
even the simplest car amplifier.
Ancestrality for Meillassoux is: "any reality anterior to the
emergence of the human species - or even anterior to every
recognized form of life on earth."" Here he is most specifically
talking about events such as the Big Bang, where we have
no way to understand this notion without the precursor
methodology and rationalizations of science. As his argument
unfolds, this definition is expanded to include all discourses
with a temporal discrepancy; which he refers to as containing
"dia- chronicity."4
The products of these realities, once arrived to our awareness
via the universality of scientific agreement are "archefossils."
This dia-chronicity is one of audio's primary existential
confounds: audio are representations of a quantified versioning
of duration, transubstantiated and projected as temporal
overlay into the present. When experienced they produce a
discrepancy between our belief in its origination from the past
(only verified by our knowledge that the media it is carried on
is only permeable through the action of human beings) and its
potentially drastic impact on our sense of being in the present.
38
39
40
(Meillassoux
Ibid. 21
Ibid. io
2010). 112
45
Meillassoux suggests a slight of hand we play on ourselves to
enable a lack of criticality when confronted with an archefossil
such as audio, what he calls "the codicil of modernity":
... the codicil through which the modern philosopher
refrains (or at least thinks she does)from intervening
in the content of science, while preserving a regime
of meaning external to and more orginary than
that of science.*
For non-scientists this signals a retreat from objectivity and a
defenseless relationship between our subjectivity and a reality
filled with archefossils whose proofs we don't understand.
Since modernity, science has had a privileged, monopolistic
relationship to non-religious claims (but with the unquestionable
authority of religion) to describing properties of objects that do
not require a constituting subject. The codicil is the mechanism
by which he claims we (non-scientist-thinkers) have removed
ourselves from the discourse of the absolute for fear of being
understood as theological or otherwise unreasonable, irrational,
and driven blindly by belief rather than thought. This avoidance
leaves the identification and quantification of primary qualities'
meaning, as well as any possible notion of objectivity to the
methodologies of scientific verification. And for Meillassoux,
science "does not experiment with a view to validating
the universality of its experiments; it carries out repeatable
experiments with a view to external referents which endow
these experiments with meaning."4
What Meillassoux claims we fear is the accusation that we a
are simple dogmatist, essentialists- espousing a tightly wound
phenomenology or are dabbling in ambivalent relativisms.
What intellectual move can we make besides acquiescing to the
social contract around science's authority over the objective?
Regardless, we can also count on science understanding nonscientific observations as naive in the best case, and heretical
in the worst. Which, given the public's consensus around
scientific authority over objective truths regarding what is real
Quentin Meillassoux, Alain Badiou, and Ray Brassier, After
41
Finitude:An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (Continuum, 2010), 13
42
Ibid.
17
vs. imaginary. This sense of entrapment, or self-censoring of
perception amounts to a panoptic relationship to observation,
as well as having and expressing thoughts or cultural products
anywhere without the caveat of it being limited to our own
thinking, humorous, or fiction (with an assumed non-utility of
the fiction).
In order to overwhelm the codicil, Meillassoux rehabilitates the
notion of primary and secondary qualities:
... we shall therefore maintain the following: all
those aspects of the object that can beformulated in
mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived
as properties of the object in itself All those aspects
of the object that can give rise to a mathematical
thought (to a formula or to digitalization) rather
than to a perception or sensation can be meaningfully
turned into properties of the thing not only as it is
with me, but also as it is without me."
Meillassoux is not claiming that a "primary quality" is something
in dialog with a universal truth nor is it a universal truth about
the object, but rather a property that a human being might feel
inspired toward within certain epistemological realms and those
that can be described with mathematics can be considered initself qualities of the thing. His larger project, in part, is to free
thinkers outside of the sciences to engage the pursuit of these
qualities with an eye toward utility in the domain of meaning.
The sciences in contrast evolve paradigmatically44 : participants
ability to quantify reproducible experimentation form the basis of
knowledge production, independent of an exploration of why the
experiments mean, except as alibi for their instrumentalization.
The sciences are also now the instrument of politics and politics
increasingly inseparable from religion globally; compounding
the authority over an open-ended subjectivity for those outside,
thinking differently.
Ibid. 10
43
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3 rd
44
ed. University of Chicago Press. The
47
With Meillassoux's metastasized reclamation of primary qualities
we can embrace with clarity the opportunity to explore what
"sound-in-itself" might constitute if not dismissed as a vague
and intoxicated "Husserlian essentialism.4 5 We will take this on
a bit later.
If we can do this, perhaps we can illuminate the polydimensionality of audio's thingness and avoid adding further
dichotomies and argumentation to a discourse that might
ultimately be more about taste than important distinctions
within reason, imagination, both or other.46
As argued in Reason and Resonance, the mind-body split needs
not be ignored, rejected, nor seen as nearly as split. We need
"oscillation" between the two: to "know with our bodies and
feel with our minds." Without this we risk a "loss of echo... the
individual's dwindling capacity for self-reflection.""
Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear
45
Sonic Art, 1st ed. (Continuum Pub Group, 2009)., 178
Pierre Boulez, Taste: 'The spectacles worn by reason?' in Orientations
46
(Harvard University Press, 1990), 44
Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern
47
Aurality (Zone Books, 2010). 315
Is Audio a Thing?
As the ways in which we interact with audio shift with ever
changing technologies, the nature of what audio are for us
has become confusing, elusive, and ultimately fractured into
multiplicity. This is true for all mechanisms through which we
relate to audio from capture to production, to cataloging, to
play back, to architecture and spatial expectations for how to
position our bodies in relationship to it.
Our time is of multiplicity, of constellation and of crashing
through the ambivalent relativism of the last thirty years and
crumbling attachments to highly capitalized unities. There is no
competition between an experience or possible experience and
that of the original experience or any other, its all an option, a
temporary truth with specific possibilities and limitations that
don't preclude the possible.
We can try them on, take them off, and remain unattached use them to expand our lexicon of schemas.48 In so far as audio
and listening are concerned it is simply our job not to engage
delusions that don't serve us, nor instead serve the last gasps of
global media capital attempting to re-hand us directions to the
ATM. Its too late now for any sole winner to arrive and control
audio, and that's an opportunity for us to shape our relationship
to it anew.
**
For the definition we will arrive at for audio, the question of
an original moment's displacement, much discussed already, is
paradoxically unimportant: a red herring that distracts us from
the full potential of audio and our relationship to it as a thing.
But to arrive here, it was necessary to break our idea of audio
in the ways attempted in the preceding pages. What we can
accomplish in the words that follow is to portray several facets
of where we can located the "thingness" of audio beyond the
A later text addresses the term "schema," historically and for
48
the refraction is can assist with in thinking about art.
subjective realms discussed already, and in the recent history of
audio representation as a spatial and social phenomenon in air.
We will intentionally avoid many facets and possible examples
and confounds. For example, radio and wireless transmissions
are not addressed. The focus here is room-scale or larger
audio representation technologies, their social architectonics,
the social drive for their creation, and how they may have
accidentally led us into a greater and richer set of awarenesses
for how "audio" can be most productively understood. To give
the reader a head-start on where all this is going, I'll make a
stab at a definition:
The etymology of "audio," is not particularly useful- the
Latin audire, which means "hear." This is not how audio
functions in our society. Our ears hear, we use our ears to
engage audio, but we don't just hear audio, nor does audio
hear us. Audio the thing, is rooted ideas, ways of thinking, that
have been embodied in technologies that provide a temporal
displacement of a captured, transubstantiationof air-born sound
and simultaneously offer the potential to desublimate this
de-energized potential back into the air as a representation
functioning as social architecture.
The inscription and re-performance of spoken language or
music transcribed from performance and re-performed are
both early instances of audio by this analysis. This is not to say
that notation or written language in general is audio, but that
these are both technologies used within a process by which
audio are committed. Audio is not a technology but a process that
employs technology.
This process results in a place; audio is a thing, but that
thing is both made of and a maker of place via duration as its
articulation as air. The placeness produced (not the place of its
making) can be considered a potential-original,but this original
is not reproducible solely through an audio process, it requires
a human being to "tune" place, with audio as one tool with
which to shift the air utilizing a rare sensitivity and patience.
Though difficult to achieve, it is not an impossibility to manifest
a social architecture whose territory transcends the lexical and
51
symbolic aspects of recorded sound and becomes a means for
people to integrate these realms into something more, being
together, or alone listening to ourselves listen. The realization
of a location pregnant with this possibility is what is meant by
place.4 9
The endless permutations of audio processes and their outcomes
suggests that the word "audio" is best understood as plural.
A plural, counting noun; it is neither one thing or a category
of thing, like "animal" nor is it a word whose contents can't
be enumerated adequately, also like "animal." To generalize a
definition for audio we need to look elsewhere, to the air and
its qualities, through a historical investigation below.
**
My first memory of having agency within an audio process was
playback selection of my father's records around 1985- I was
five years old. The collection was housed vertically in an open
shelving unit made of pine board and dowels. This meant the
records on the lower two shelves were easily handled by a small
person, but the upper shelves entirely unknown. My dad is a
hippie intellectual, a psychologist; and the collection was more
or less classics of late 6os and 70s psych rock, some jazz, blues,
and a handful of non-European musics, Zen Meditation records
(what do they do?) and some a cluster of hammered dulcimer
recordings from around where I was born in North Carolina.
Two of the records that caught my attention early on where The
Beatles' White Album and Jimi Hendrix's Are you experienced?
The two records provoked very different types of experiences
for me, but capture the beginnings, probably very similar for
many kids, of a relationship with audio via music and the social
space it produces.
Though Francisco Lopez is referenced in a subsequent section
49
of these texts saying something very similar about the intentions he has
for his own work, this desire to achieve a sense of place that goes beyond
sound or music or audio or color or material or geometry is common
to many artists and musicians, regardless of how they imagine the
philosophical position of their work vis a vis in-itself qualities, a discussion
we'll arrive at later.
The White Album I remember my father explaining to me; I
think he felt it was critical that I knew it was an important
record and had a special cultural value that until my later teens
I wouldn't understand at all. Why was there nothing on the
cover!? Jimi Hendrix on the other hand quickly became all
about transforming the room with sound. I would put on Purple
Haze and jump around like I was setting a guitar on fire - a
Hendrix story my father told me as I got into the album. Side
two had Fire. This record was the first instance of audio being
a place for me and this place had its own rules and was an
invitation to certain types of behavior.
The room, when filled with the sounds of Hendrix's band,
permissioned actions that would be understood by everyone
in the room as normal and acceptable conduct, but only while
swimming in this particular, re-calibrated air: room saturating
audio playback as social architecture. What had changed was
an intersubjective relationship to the air and what was possible
there, now in relationship to the shift induced by audio. Audio
constructs momentary, affective physical behavior that is surreal,
psychotic, or simply other when the audio representation of
sound is removed from sound.50
In the case of my Jimi Hendrix moments, the behavior felt
only acceptable in the context of the audio's quantitative. Had
I continued beyond the air produced by the audio, I would
disrupt the normative behaviors I understood as required for
that space if enacted without it. Dropping the needle, initiated
the representation, conjures another social architecture. On a
small scale, this temporary place is a site of liberation. At its
best, this is what audio, in all of its in-human, un-real, artifactness can do for us.
In the artist Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 two hardcore punk
50
bands perform in the Guggenheim Museum as part of "The Order"
segment. They are on stages made of salt and in front of them is a
mosh pit surrounded by security guards. The bands are at times entirely
unamplified: power chords with no power. Just the small sound of a pick
and a solid piece of wood, screaming vocals nearly inaudible- what was
left to hear. But the according social architecture, a ritualistic mosh-pit
situation remains unchanged and the effect is an extraordinarily rendering
of this phenomena. A distant, but related example: if we could manifest in
space the imaginary conversation partners of a schizophrenic, would the
individual still be schizophrenic? Can the words produced by psychosis be
considered audio in a culture where a state of mind is othered by a notion
of disease, as if a distinct entity is using the body as a puppet?
53
**
Capturing the total intrigue of historic relations between audio
and conduct is beyond the intent of this text. For our purposes,
we will sketch the evolution of building-scale and what can be
called "Land Art-scale" sound systems from the late 196os to
present with a focus on the USA and Europe. This is where
the majority of the technology was developed before Japan
(and now China) took over with personal audio, introducing
the Walkman in the early i98os." We also will intentionally
not focus on the music or sound recordings themselves, as
much has been written about all of the artists and movements
mentioned. What has received much less attention is the
situational relations between audio technology and social space:
large-scale, communal topographies of air. This will take us
toward more possible clarities in thinking about how to locate
audio.
**
La Monte Young's Dream House is located in lower Manhattan
and has been, with some interruption an ongoing sound
installation for more than twenty years. The idea for the space
was conceived of in the late 196os. The upstairs rooms on
Church Street, contain a magenta light installation by Young's
partner, Marianne Zazeela, plush carpeting, and specially
created loudspeakers whose main drivers are nearly four feet
in diameter. The composition is being created invisibly by an
analog synthesizer tuned to 32 different frequencies. The result
is a listening situation, in collaboration with the architecture,
design, and lighting, that seems to be an unchanging audio
environment, but only if you are still. As you move, as the space
invites you to with its differing zones of light, the frequency
lattice reconfigures itself as you enter different nodes of the
various wavelengths being projected and your body absorbs
a new set of frequencies, the ear presents a new, coloristic
distortion.
Japan was a major manufacture of home hi-fi components
51i
throughout the 197os, but the design innovations were primarily
American and European.
The room and the visitor's body is used as an elaborate four
dimensional filter.
This work is perhaps the most widely known and lauded
example of "sound installation" post-1960 and aside from
Max Neuhaus's Times Square, which has run longer, began
earlier, and under the auspices of DIA:Foundation, the most
"permanent."
One would think that a work like this would be deemed beyond
syndication, but there have been several attempts. These have
taken place due to the cult status of the work, Young's fame,
and increased interest from the visual arts world in "composers"
whose practice is beyond the conceptual frame of western
music. Several museums have at great expense attempted to
recreate the Dream House as part of survey exhibitions relating
to "sound art." We'll consider two of them in addition to the
Church Street space: Centre Pompidou in Paris and Zentrum far
Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany.
In both cases, the installations were prepared by the artist and
a top technician who has worked with him for several decades
(B.B.). Nevertheless, if we take the imperative of the work to
be realized adequately in New York, the attempts to relocate the
Dream House were failures. These attempts at reproduction
present a unique paradox to lance.
Young's Dream House is a place that involves an audio process,
but is not primarily audio. Audio is but a component, and one
that is contingent on the subtle play of architectural acoustics
and unfettered control over sound levels. In New York, Young
owns the building and lives there on a separate floor. Loudness
is not mediated by consideration for other tenants, for the
autonomy of other artist's work, or for a sense of decorum
germane to friendly and state-funded cultural institutions. The
necessary pre-conditions for the work's installation rarely exist
in a museum setting.
Were he to situate his practice and his notion of an original or
"the work" differently, Young could have chosen to recalibrate
the audio frequencies to accommodate the new acoustic and
social conditions; he had the option not to commit an act of
55
audio against his own piece which in New York is actually in
instance of music, much more than audio. But he believes that
there is an original in the form of a place- and that this can
be disentangled from what he accomplished uniquely within
a building he owns and whose context he has cultivated over
many years.
For Young, the frequencies chosen for inclusion in the Dream
House have their own, in-itself property that can function
aside from their contingent effect as air. This notion articulates
his refusal of this contingency and replaces it with a universal
whose philosophical basis lies in the time, place, and affect
specificity within several strains of traditional music in India,
re-aligned in collaboration with Young during the 196os by
the mathematician Catherine Christer Hennix. On the one
hand the world claims a specificity little other American or
European-continuum musics have claimed since the Middle
Ages, yet simultaneously rejects an empirical difference obvious
to anyone relating an experience of Church St to ZKM, for
example. Young's willingness to relocate the work betrays the
primary insight of his work: music's potential to transform
consciousness by tuning the body via listening.
So when does a place produced in part by audio become or not
become this "is" rather than the "ism"" of a failed attempt at
reproduction, yielding an unintended representation aspiring to
be a lost original? If our perceptual apparatus works within a
bandwidth of sensitivity and history, unique for each of us, how
is it that a large group will "know" something is not happening
that could be? There is a sense of loss that comes with thissomething has not taken place that should have. We might
expect this perception to be quite individual and the product
of taste alone, but it is often felt clearly by groups as well. We
have all attended a performance where aside from whether we
enjoy or don't enjoy, its clear that a perceptual measure of it
being present was somehow not reached.
Perhaps it is through a kind of perceptual mirroring, or
entrainment with the air that we find the inner and outer
This issa rearrangement of a phrase Anthony Braxton used
52
often while teaching at Wesleyan University in the 2000S "Don't let the
ISM get bigger than the IS", Personal Communication
merging or not, we have a sense of a close encountering of
present-placeness within a duration, our something, or not? We
know what this feels like, but how is it that this merging into a
shared sense of the moment is a kind of precondition for many
types of peak affective experiences? This is not only true of
music or performance or an artwork, but also in friendships, in
love, in sexual encounters.
The evolution of audio technologies has been an attempt to
manufacture this sense of being together here and now in a reliable
way. In music this is produced via a trans-personal, delicately
human capacity often thought of as a very rare occurrence
amongst the neurodiversity of the species. Attempting to
machine the air into the byproduct of this inter-human
form of communication and alignment is particularly true
of loudspeakers: aside from lightning they are the primary
interface between electricity, air, and our bodies. We'll focus on
this interface in the text that follows.
"p
"Anything
less of what we are capable of perceiving is an insult" 3
*#
53
2012,
The Funktion 1 Sound System Explained, streaming video, AIAIAI,
http://www.aiaiai.dk/blog/the -funktion- -soundsystem-explained
57
I
I
Audio is Air is Social Architecture
In the example of childhood desublimation ecstasy facilitated by
Hendrix and a parental sound system, the social architectural
rupture was not inhibited by any lack of sensuousness in the
representation. At that age, few children, this one included
had heard very few other home audio systems; nobody in the
family or community was particularly audiophilic,and the family
weren't regular attendees to venues for music that would have
had paid any close attention to, or financially invested in the
details of their sound systems.
However, it is the sensuality of the air, even in the form it was
represented within that living room, that abducted a child from
the mundane. This type of abduction into a heightened state of
being is what La Monte Young produces at Dream House and
related artists such as Maryanne Amacher and Iannis Xenakis
(in his Polytopes like Persepolis) each developed in their own way
in the 1970s within the area of experimental music.
Beyond the living room there was extensive exploration of
what audio could be when projected at large scale. The historic
Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris formalized their
orchestra of loudspeakers called The Acousmonium in 1974.54
This sound system was used within conventional concert halls,
with the speakers (many different types) placed on stage as if
to simulate the spatial distribution of musicians in an orchestra.
It coincided with a performance practice to "diffuse" or to
make more spatial, music composed on magnetic tape. At the
beginning of this practice the tapes were monophonic, evolved
to stereo, but the performance practice of routing this transsubstance as the performance of audio has continued into the
present via academic programs in electronic music throughout
Europe and Canada, with some presence in the USA, Argentina,
Mexico, Brazil and Japan."
This system's intention was to replace and extend performance
54
positions on a stage for the live "diffusion" (mixing) presentation of
prerecorded magnetic tape.
This practice in North America has been most prevalent
55
in Montreal where the shared language (French) afforded extensive
back and forth between Canadian and French composers. In Mexico,
Argentina, and Brazil there are a handful of Universities with small
59
In the same year The Grateful Dead went on tour with their
''Wall of Sound."
Preceding these developments in the USA and Europe was
Jamaican sound system culture, whose participants had for a
decade already been making homemade sound systems that
could project audio at Land Art scale. In Jamaica the production
of recordings, performance with these systems, and the systems
themselves were often owned by the same person. A "sound
system" in this context doesn't only refer to the audio equipment,
but to the people involved as performers and engineers as well.
The human-technology amalgam is a "sound system." But the
technology was central: often extremely powerful at 20,000+
watts and of very high quality, "sound systems" performed
outdoors, the dance hall was the city. 6
Contrary to how we listen to Dub today, largely as personal
audio played in our homes or cars, the early records played in
these outdoor spaces were produced solely for this practice of
weather-like diffusion. Even the discs themselves were made
out of an extremely soft material that would not decode after
many playings- although Dub was and is a "studio music"
that produces recordings, it's origins are not coherent with an
American or European conception of record distribution. So,
when we listen to Mad Professor or King Tubby or Augustus
Pablo now, we should think of this as if we are experiencing a
Smithson via fax.
What made all of these, and many other new ways of thinking
and experiences possible were major imaginative leaps and
subsequent technical developments in loudspeaker system
design. Beginning in the late-196os, loudspeaker, amplification,
and signal processing technologies coalesced around a new
vision of detail, quality, and scale which made possible largegroup social contexts within which experiences of the new
air these systems were possible. These situations isometrically
departments that engage in this practice as well, though the continuance
has been European. France, Belgium, UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland,
and Spain each have educational and cultural institutions that still support
this practice of live diffusion.
Michael Veal, Dub (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
56
2007).
emerged in nearly every area of musical and stage production
and traveled quickly around the world via excitement over what
they could accomplish socially.
The first large "rock music festival" in the way we think of them
today happened only in 1967: The Monterey Pop Festival. The
sound system for the festival was designed by Abe Jacob, who
had been a Bay Area engineer for rock shows (Jimi Hendrix,
Peter, Paul, and Mary, etc). The system was minuscule by
today's standards but was an enormous leap from what had
been the norm: bands performing with only vocals and perhaps
some drums through a tiny on-stage PA. Individual instrument
amplifiers would provide the rest of the direct sound. For
example, it was only three years before Monterey that the
Beatles came to the USA for the first time playing with thirty
watt VOX guitar amplifiers and a one hundred watt public
address for vocals. Most small cars come with nearly as much
power, today.
In the two images below of the Monterey Pop stage, we can
see that there are two stacks of speakers on stage and two
stacks rigged on the top of the stage roof. At this time there
were no digital delays and so we can assume that the time delay
between these was audible, though did ensure the throw of
the sound would reach the entire crowd. There were no fill-in
speakers or surrounds as we'd see today.
Monterey Pop Festival 1967 - Sound System [D.A. Pennebaker]
F
Monterey Pop Festival 1967 - Audience + Sound System Elements [DA. Pennebaker]
61
With Monterey we see the American beginnings of a
reciprocity between a social desire for collectivizing audio
experience (though it was thought of as live music and not
audio) and audio technology that would need to quickly evolve
to meet this desire. In this initial shift away from each musician
controlling directly the sound reaching the audience (as the
Beatles and everyone else did in this period) the model of audio
as a representation and not an "original", even in a live music
setting, comes into focus.
The Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound" system was a nearterm revolutionary return to the previous era in that it did
away with the need to have a mixing engineer in the audience
creating a duality of perception between the band and the
audio representation- common practice then and now. The
on-stage band listens, reacts, and shapes a representation of
their performance for themselves in collaboration with an
audio engineer (often addition to the house engineer) via onstage speakers facing the musicians. The audience hears a mix
composed for them by an engineer who shares their listening
perspective.
If the intention of a concert at this time was to create a
collectivizing, trans-personal experience that bridged the
experiential gap between performers and audience, everyone
involved in that process should be engaging with the shape of
one representation, not two. The Grateful Dead's approach
was a Utopian model for audio that reflected the band's cultural
position, but proved financially unfeasible (the transport and
setup costs of such systems is enormous).
The Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound" in 1974 [Richard Pechner]
The designer of the Monterey Pop system, Abe Jacob, is also
credited for inventing the field of sound design for Broadway
shows (he did the original runs of Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar,
Cats, A Chorus Line, Chicago, others). He moved to NYC in
order to take the position of managing Hendrix's recording
study Electric Ladyland on the basis of his reputation coming
out of Monterey and happened to be in a theater while there
were some technical problems, which opened the door for his
perspective to spread."
Prior to his presence
handled by the stage
expertise to calibrate
a specialist would. At
in the field, theater sound was simply
manager, who would not have had the
the experience of the room in the way
that time and audio engineer nor sound
designer was a default component of a theater's operational
staff.
The production of theater now, with all performers often
wirelessly mic'd and mixed from the audience along with
lighting and video automation is recent and a radical shift
from the conception which had existed for over a millenia: the
theater not as a media technology but as a stage with supportive
acoustics for people. The theater today is an assumed, mix of
media, technology, and human capacity. The theater is now
a total media instrument- a trajectory put into motion by the
chain reaction caused by Jacob's transport of recent large-scale
rock-context audio innovations.
At this time, every large-scale PA was a custom-built enterprise
and still relied on theories of sound diffusion physics that were
extensions of the movie sound speaker arrangement (horizontal
or small vertical stacks on stage). Further, the outdoor venues
used for rock and pop concerts had almost exclusively been
designed for orchestras performing without amplification. The
architecture was designed to project the acoustic mass of an
orchestra outward to an audience of two thousand or more,
attempting to simulate an indoor concert hall.
Interview with Abe Jacob, Live Design 9/1/2002, http://
57
livedesignonline.com/mag/show-businessabe-jacob
63
The audio engineering community was struggling to find a way
to overcome the disconnects between recent and established
architecture built to reinforce acoustic sound via reverberation
and amplified sound where these acoustics would destroy the
clarity, especially at the high levels desired. In a 1969 paper
presented at the Audio Engineering Society's yearly convention
these issues were described:
No sooner had we resolved the problem ofproviding
a suitable environmentfor natural orchestralsound
in these buildings.,.then, in typical American
fashion...the program use broadened and the very
spaces that were planned only five or six years ago,
solely for orchestral use...became stages for a wide
variety of popular music attractions including rock
and roll.
Suddenly, we were faced with a series of basic
conflicts in terms of providing an excellent
natural orchestral sound in the pavilion, high
quality symphony reinforcement on the lawn, and
intellhgible pop and rock sound, at high levels, in
both the pavilion and the lawn areas.
The very physical acoustics techniques that were
employed to create sustained sound pressure levels
of the reverberantfield in the early portion of the
decay curve, came back to haunt us as unintelligible
mush when the rock groups'guitar amplifiers
performed in the orchestra shells.5"
The paper presents a design for the Mississippi River Festival in
St. Louis. As you will see in the images below, there are already
major innovations to what existed at Monterey. Speakers are
placed at several distances with a time-delay system employed so
that bleed between layers of amplification would be reasonably
time-aligned.
58
Christopher Jaffe, "Sound Reinforcement in the Music Pavilion,"
in Audio Engineering Society Convention 37, 1969, http://www.aes.
org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=1316.
E00
00
000
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Loudspeaker Design for Mississippi River Festival 1969
Credit: Chris Jaffe
65
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Schematic for Rack Processing of Live Sound to Loudspeakers
Credit: Chris Jaffe
1
Throughout the 1970s, significant technical and production
innovation crow-barred a paradigm shift to take place. The
major manufacturers who developed their business model,
research approach, and designs during the movie sound era,
acoustic country and jazz (Altec, ElectroVoice, MGM, et al),were
unable to anticipate the cultural shift that was underfoot and
how it related to audio representation in new social spaces.
Most were slowly outrun by younger engineers who were a
part of the new intentions for the cultural life of their generation
and what these systems needed to be capable of achieving.59
So less than a decade after the explosion of rock music as
a style and rock music as an experience of large-scale audio,
Disco emerged. From the beginning, Disco was, as the arts
writer Tan Lin described it: "an operating system.",6 o
Disco was as much a place as a style of music, and these places
mushroomed through the United States, Europe and South
America. These locations unfolded from loft parties in New
York City in parallel development to the re-appropriation of
industrial buildings by visual artists and musicians in lower
Manhattan normally referred to as "the loft scene." These
early spaces are the whistle that begins an ongoing cultural
where building-scale, extremely detailed audio representation
becomes the defining necessity for certain types of peak,
affective, communizing experiences.
The experience of audio produced by the sound systems of
upper tier disco clubs was unlike anything a human being
had encountered to that point in history. These places were
the convergent sites of social desire, technology, engineers,
artists, and perceptual modifications afforded to participants
by stimulants, primarily.6' We should not underestimate the
ripple-effects of such spaces for transforming the senses and
the unpredictable cultural shifts theses sensory developments
can propel.
About Meyer Sound, http://www.meyersound.com/about/
59
history.htm
6o
Tan Lin, "Disco as Operating System, Part One," Criticism 50,
no. 1 (2008): 83-00
61
Thomas Lyttle and Michael Montagne, "Drugs, Music, and
Ideology: A Social Pharmacological Interpretation of the Acid House
Movement"(July 3, 2009)
67
**
Before continuing to explore the air of disco, there are three
sites where other spaces of remarkable audio that could have
been experienced prior: the "movie palaces" of the monopolyera Hollywood film industry, recording and mastering studios,
and in Jamaica or amongst the Jamaican diaspora engaged in
"sound system" culture.
A now-distant fact of audio history is that from the 1920S
until the early 1950s the highest fidelity recording medium
was photographic film.2 It had the least noise and greatest
fidelity. In cinemas of this era, one would have experienced
audio played back via this medium, far superior to radio or
any format within the evolution of phonography. However, the
acoustics in these spaces were not tuned for recorded sound,
but were largely designed from a vision of exotic architectural
simulation- built around Egyptian, Chinese, Aztec fantasy or
in simulation of European grandeur. An exemplar is the Aztec
Theater in San Antonio, Texas whose original proscenium
decor was imagery of Montezuma meeting Cortez."
For the duration of this era, the loudspeaker systems in use
were located behind the perforated screen, and not imagined
to fill the space with sound as would become the norm. After
the acoustic properties of disco and immersive sound were
appropriated as spectacle by the culture industry as a whole,
cinemas transformed into the acoustically dead, high-decibel
audio rooms they exist as today.
Within the recording industry, since the 1950s there were
studios whose sound systems could provide extraordinarily
detailed and powerful audio representations, but these were
cloistered locations, exclusive to professionals and their invitees,
and only available to small numbers of people at once. This
remains true to the present, where few people, even music
62
John Mosely, "Motion Picture Sound in Record Industry
Perspective,"in Audio Engineering Society Convention 66, 19 8 o
63
"Aztec Theater Official Site,"accessed March 26, 2013, http://
www.theaztectheatre.com/the-theatre/.
professionals, ever enter a precisely tuned mastering studio
where the build-out costs can be in the millions.
In Europe there were also electronic music studios popping
up, particularly in France and Germany. These spaces and the
composers who were afforded the luxury of treating them
as near-private laboratories were heavily invested in by the
governments. This investment came in part from a desire to
re-identify a national muvsic and identity after WWII as well as a
participation in the scientific and technological optimism of the
time. Einstein, Fuller, Feynman, Sagan, and Cybernetic- as a few
example -were producing excitement via popular media. Design
was transforming living space via new modes of production
and control over new materials. The techno-optomism was
blooming and this, on its own generated excitement for the
products of Aalto and Eames.
In France Pierre Boulez was able to initiate IRCAM, which is
to this day the most well-funded center for electronic music
research. The blaze of post-war science-optimism afforded
Boulez the change to institutionalize an incredibly esoteric and
cloistered area of artistic practice in concert with a deliberate
ignorance and public suppression as to its military implications
and the funding contingencies of complicity. This quiet symbiosis
continues into the present with the Defence Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) funding University-based media art
institutions such as Stanford's Center for Computer Research
6
in Music and Acoustics as well as MIT's Media Lab. 4 65 66
**
Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the
64
Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (University of California
Press, 1995). 159
Matthew Wright et al., "CCRMA Studio Report," accessed
65
May 5, 2013, https://ccrma.stanford.edu/-matt/studioreport/CCRMAstudioreport.pdf.
Gordon Wetzstein et al., "Compressive Light Field Displays,"
66
Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE 32, no. 5 (2012): 6-11.
69
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In New York, the combination of harsh post-industrial
acoustics, a desired social architecture, and economic necessity
on the part of the clubs to meet these desires or fail pushed
technology to develop quickly. The major innovations of this
era were numerous.
Richard Long & Associates (RLA) designed many of the top
clubs during the disco era: notably Studio 54 and Paradise
Garage, along many others in the USA, Europe, South America,
the Middle East and elsewhere. RLA is broadly credited for
making discos the immersive audiotopias6 7 that they were.
The reason RLA became a worldwide name was
that each of their systems was thoughtfully and
painstakingly tailored to the individual needs of
the space. The process was somewhere between that
of a high-end tailor crafting a bespoke suit for a
VIP customer and a specially commissioned artist
painting a portrait of an esteemed patron.6
This "tailoring" created rooms which were hyper-sensitively
aural in ways the general public had never experienced and
the most advanced DJs of the era were exploring the potential
of this sensitivity with sophistication. A social architecture
emerged around liberated sexuality and identity within the
semi-autonomous, near-imaginary air that the disco sound
environment enabled. Long was not simply an engineering
bystander but an active participant in the imaginary. As one
playful indication of this, he named his inventions in ways that
linked them to the social milieus they engaged: Double 12"Dildo
and Pussiance, for example. It is impossible to imagine Meyer
Sound in the USA or D&B in Germany understanding their role
as aligned particularly with one or another social movement in
this way.
Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, And America (University of
California Press, 2005).
67
68
Richard Long & Associates: The Men Who Made Disco Go
Boom | Soci&6 Perrier., 2013. Soci&6 Perrier. Accessed January 24.
http://societeperrier.com/new-york/articles/richard-long-associates-themen-who-made-disco-go-boom/.
71
,Milo
Paradise
RLA designed the Paradise Garage system in use at the time.
It is illuminating to take a close look at this system as it was
arguably the apex of disco sound in North America, though
musically many would argue that by its opening in 1977, disco
had been largely co-opted by the record industry and had a
transformed clientele and cultural position. Regardless of the
status of disco's music or who was there compared to the
previous years, the Paradise Garage benefited from almost a
decade of rapid technological advance.
Previous to opening the new venue it had been another dance
club. Enormous, it was a 20,000 square foot space with a
single dance floor using the majority of the space. Under that
ownership the business had been a financial disaster and closed.
According to Long, the failure of the business was due to a
6
sound system that was extremely undersized for the room
,
and consequently was out of step with the expectations of disco
patrons of the time.
An ex-lover of the Garage's owner (Mel Charen) put up the
money to retain RLA and ensure the sound system was ideal70
and RLA agreed to install the equipment over a period of time
as funding could be delivered. They phased-out the old system
in pieces, developing custom devices to suit the room. The
resident DJ would be Larry Levan, who was the most widely
acclaimed of the time. The sound system would be developed
not only to address the acoustics, but also Levan's performance
technique, accumulated over the previous decade.
The new owners subdivided the warehouse and the main dance
floor was reduced to 5,000 square feet. For this space, Long
designed and fabricated a unique bass horn (called the Levan
Horn) as well as a new enclosure to replace the four existing
sub-bass speakers. Each was iooo watts and had 28 square
Alan Fierstein and Richard Long, "State-of-the-Art Discotheque
69
Sound Systems-System Design and Acoustical Measurement," 1980, 1
"Paradise Garage, a Gay Club That Forever Changed Night
70
Life - New York Times," New York Times, accessed March
27,
2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2ooo/o6/i8/style/paradise-garage-a-gayclub -that-forever- changed- night-life.html?pagewanted=all&src =pm.
73
foot "mouths" (the open surface area that projects sound
outward from the drivers). According to RLA's testing, one of
these overpowered allfour of the speakers previously used to
activate a space four times the size.
Unique full-range speakers were also designed (the Ultima) and
only the original overhead tweeter arrays were kept, though
used differently within the overall signal flow and control system.
RLA also designed a unique crossover system in collaboration
with the acoustician Alan Fierstein whose "most unique feature
is that the two extreme ranges of 20 to ioo Hz and 7 K to 20K
Hz are controllable in volume by the Disc Jockey with up to 16
dB of gain built into the circuit." For reference, every 6dB of
increase is a doubling of perceived loudness. 7'
Long defends the choice to give the DJ direct control over such
a powerful sound system:
In order to explain our concept of a disco system,
let us give this analogy: In a discotheque the sound
system can be considered to be the orchestra while
the DJ is the conductor. The conductor's job is to
stimulate and entertain the audience; the DJ must
entertain the dancers. The DJ is not reproducing
the works of Bach or Brahms as performed in a
symphony hall, but is instead playing music which
was created in a multi-track studio under artificial
conditionsand mixed by an engineeralso attempting
to create the most exciting sound possible72
RLA developed many other special components for this space,
including a suspension system for the turntable tuned to 2HZ
with rubber bands. Their relationship as a support to the artistic
needs of the DJ:
Since the DJ is responsiblefor creating an exciting
sound, we try to make sure he has enough tools at
his disposal. Such special effect devices are:
Alan Fierstein and Richard Long, "State-of-the-Art Discotheque
Sound Systems-System Design and Acoustical Measurement,"198o,
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib= 3 682. 3
71
72
Ibid.
2
1) Our special Electronic Crossover (discussed
earlier);
2) The DBX Boom Box, which provides a blend of
25 - 50 Hz bass synthesized from 50 - 100 Hz
informationpresent on the recording;
3)Dynamic Range Expanders, used to undo the
compressionfound in most recordings;
4) The Deltalab Acousticomputer and similar
devices,used to alter or add to the sound of the
recording
5) The AudionicsSpace & Image Composer, a
4-channel synthesizer; and
6) New devices currently under development; such
as the Acoustilog Image Enhancer, which expands
the stereo effect. All of these devices, except the last
7
1
two, are currently installedat the Garage
The following are images and diagrams of the RLA-designed
and installed system at Paradise Garage:
DJ Controls [Richard Long and Associates]
73
Ibid. 5
75
Paradise Garage Sound System Block Diagram [Richard Long and Associates]
Levan Horn (bottom) and Ultima (top)
[Richard Long and Associates]
Equipment Rack at Paradise Garage
[Richard Long and Associates]
L= Levan Sub-Bass Horn
W= Waldorf Bass Speaker
U= Ultima Full-Range Speaker
V= Pseudo-Klipsch Horn
SB= Small Sub-Bass Horn
T= Tweeter Array (hung from ceiling)
Paradise Garage Sound System Design // Credit: Richard Long and Associates
77
Below a listener's description of how Nicky Siano, another of
the foremost DJs of the time, was thinking about the social
architecture, silence, and reactions to different frequency
bands. Siano would have been using similar controls to those
described above:
Nicky Siano took his sub bass beyond. He wanted
this heavy sound. Nicky Siano, his Richard Long
tweeters, he had Alex Rosner stuff also, but he
wanted the crossover points to be so much that
when you took out the centre, you could hear no
programme [i.e. song], you could hear tss tsss tss
[hi hat], and bummmm bumm [bass] and every
once in a while, especially in the black clubs, with
the dancing, everybody would be so together with
it, they'd be sometimes singing and Nicky would
bring it up and then all of a sudden BOOM! It
was flawless, and the lighting was with it perfectly.
When the room went to clack [i.e. the music] it
would be black [the lights]. And yet there'd be a
couple of hundredpeople in there dancing.And you
couldn't see your hand infront of yourface.And it'd
be so intense. It would be so intense. And then all
of a sudden something would come on. Then lights
would come on like normal, and everything was
dddddd [climactic brass stabs].Nothing automated.
It was perfection. It was perfection."
The social architecture of disco was an outgrowth or even the
more real, realization of the 6os optimism via social dancing
in a hyper-affective space. While arguing that this would not
have been possible without parallel developments in audio
representation, the two, just as rock festivals had several years
earlier, and urbanization drove the realization of Jamaican
sound systems,they needed each other. Building-scale sound
meant that a small town's population could fit themselves
into a floor of a warehouse and quite literally be swimming
together in sound waves. This meant all bodies in contact,
moving together, transcending the common kinetic limitations
of individuality present during the 50s and early 6os America
of the dancer's youth.
Broughton, Frank. "Bob Casey Interview." http://www.
74
djhistory.com/interviews/bob-casey.
Discos have been historicized as a dominantly gay scene,
and while it is clear that in post-Stonewall New York City
discos became a home for gay liberation, it was also a home
for a social context that could absorb any willing body into
its territory. This communality is also what defined the early
rave scene, which is the next occurrence of large-scale social
dancing after hard rock and pop-spectacle overran disco in the
Reagan years. 75
Air Everywhere
Land Art-scale audio quickly expanded into every cultural layer
of society. In 1975, Accentech, an acoustical consultant, was
hired to make a permanent installation at Tanglewood.76 What
we now call the Koussevitzky Music Shed is about as culturally
distant from The Paradise Garage as you could get in 1975, but
its important to link these developments as the technology to
create new social architectures.
At this time, with amplified orchestras only beginning to exist,
it wasn't clear that a public would pay to sit on a lawn, beyond
the enclosure for the orchestra, and listen to a representation
of the music being performed out of earshot. This new type
of "being there" is an entirely different aurality and sense of
human connection between musician and audience than had
existed in orchestral contexts prior.
What is experienced is not an "original" even with the physical
proximity to the performers- and to go a step further, without
a direct acoustic link between performer and listener's bodies,
we can ask ourselves: is this experience even "music" in the
way it was understood anymore?
Disco and the Queering of the Dance Floor, 2013. Accessed January
24. http://www.academia.edu/io66547/_Disco-andtheQueering-of_
theDanceFloor_.pdf
Anne Guthrie, Acoustical Consultant with ARUP, personal
76
communication
75
79
Is a powerful loudspeaker system significantly more significantly
distancing to a direct human-human musical encounter than an
cathedral-scale organ's pipes? What if we were listening to the
cathedral amplified to an adjacent lawn?
These distinctions are not important for our project, but the
obvious complexities of the many possible scenarios we can
imagine and how little resolution beyond rejection/acceptance
we have culture-wide. The readiness to accept these types
of representations as music paved the way for the confusion
we now have to identify what isn't audio, rather than what is,
and our reliance on hyperbolic descriptions of musical style or
genre, rather than anything more absolute.
The audience at Tanglewood, seated on the lawn in
2012
[Kelly Newman]
THE
ARTIST
The Sound of Composition's
Aura Being Popped
The period of time from the late 1960s to 1980 we've been
thinking about in terms of loudspeaker systems is simultaneous
to shifts relating to the authorship via related technology. While
overdubbing was already a practice in the early 193Os"1, it is the
transition to magnetic tape-based audio that afforded what we
think of now "the [recording] studio as compositional tool".7879
As tape gave way to digital in the 80s, algorithmic composition
tools, software-based composition systems that were
not simulating the recording studio, but were explicitly
"compositional tools" existed that could permute music endlessly.
While "algorithmic" models were used on paper by composers
already in the 196os, entirely computer-based real-time sound
synthesis originates with Max Matthews at Bells Labs. This
practice remained relatively cloistered throughout the 8os and
exploded in the 90s as inexpensive personal computing became
powerful enough and the computer industry embraced "sound
cards" as a necessity.
While electricity made possible the first loud, human constructed
sounds that were beyond the range of what a human body
can sustain, computer-based tools also made the process of
musical invention something that could be experienced as a
representation alone (or as code, another representation for
those who had developed their imaginations along side these
new languages).
These technologies made possible art works whose primary
materials was sound, that could go on forever, did not contain
the illusion of an originary moment via inscription, could selfgenerate unintended material with few instructions, and for
An Enrico Caruso recording from the -1910 was overdubbed
77
with an orchestral accompaniment and released in 1931 by Victor
Brian Eno, PRO SESSION -The Studio As Compositional Tool,
78
Downbeat Magazine, 1979
Of course this quote from Brian Eno was old news already to
79
practitioners, but Eno was in a position to popularize an idea that had
been enacted in the cloisters of academic 'tape music" produced in
Europe and USA beginning in the late 1950s.
which there is arguably no original and arguably no LatL author.
To some extent this area of artistic production has never come
into the awareness of the general public- and returning to an
idea from a previous text -supports the notion that audio has
never had to contend with a kind of "original sin" relating to
Turing, we've always found ways to project human testimony
into our listening to representations. Nevertheless, the arrival
of computers makes it all the more important to think toward
clarity in differentiating between music, sound, audio, listening,
and each of their unique and overlapping qualities.
The implications for composers who were aware of these
new tools was significant and schismatic. On the one hand, a
composer could generate material within a range of possibilities
- and conditional control structures or simple probabilistic
models have remained a standard feature of contemporary
programming environments that aim to produce audio. On the
other hand, the authorship of this material would be in the
parametric construction and if one chooses, the editing of a
computer's permutations within it.
During the decades where our relationship to audio developed
and these "original-less" forms of audio emerged, media
companies co-opted the public very carefully in order to
maintain the illusion of an original and the illusion of authorship
models that maintained the aura and myth of composers and
musicians arriving at their music not from permutation and
labor, but near-divine inspiration or genius, even as the pop
music of the 8os and 90s became increasingly pseudo-diverse,
radio stations consolidated, reaching a near-monopoly state in
the mid-late 90s. Computers and by the late 9os, the Internet,
posed an existential threat to the music industry and the
carefully cultivated aura of their products.
Unlike the promoters who gambled in 1975 on selling tickets to
proximate representation at Tanglewood, the record industry
was not convinced that the public would pay for anything but
the original mythology of albums being "music" and an item
to collect as an identity construct requiring physical space and
an accumulating fiduciary body- a kind of identity rather than
artifacts to make space and imagination.
83
DATA SOURCE
INPUT TYPE
TARIA~s
DESCRIPTION
.-
B vr a
5747DURAT/0N
r
vl
an,uldsue
rraroh
MODULES (BIDULE)
During this time, the composer Maryanne Amacher was
working on an elaborate project - a media opera for the
home called Intelligent Life.8 o The project was never realized,
but the treatments express a Utopian vision for music and a
type of virtual reality in 2021 that contains an embedded vision
for a resolution between brain sciences, computers, artificial
intelligence, and subjectivity.
In the world of IL, human beings have finally grasped, as
Amacher quotes Lewis Thomas that "Music is the effort we
make to understand how our brains work" and are focused on
exploring music in service of opening up our expanding our
way of being. It also contains lucid insights and critique into a
mouthful of a conundrum-in-hand:
How can we expect to distinguish between the what that we
listen to (e.g. music, sound, audio, language, etc), if we can't
perceive anything absolute about the air we are listening in
with conviction enough that this perception would alter our
identification of the what?!"
The Triadex Music and it's accompanying loudspeaker- an early algorithmic pattern generator
designed by Marvin Minsky and Edward Friedkin in 1972. The device was imagined to be used in
the home, infinitely permuting musical structures. [Morgan Fischer]
80
All materials relating to Intelligent Life remain unpublished and
references and documents included here are used with permission from
the Maryanne Amacher Archive.
81
The emergence of Minimalism and Meillassoux's notion of
correlationism will be used to hack this knot a bit deeper into the text.
85
To illuminate this with Amacher's science-fictional critique,
a lengthy quotation from Intelligent Life, "Background to the
Musical Intrigue" follows:
This all began with computer softwarefor the homedesigned to give people the pleasure of "composing"
-- i.e., modifying EXISTENT patterns in Bach,
Mozart, Beethoven, Reich -- making subtle, or
not so subtle, variations and developments of this
music. What become know as 1st Order Artificial
Intelligence Scores, made it possible to create
'imitative' music cheaply and efficiently. By 1995
such imitative scores were toys of children!
REALLY any melodic patterns (rhythmic and
tonal) a composer might make, and wish a variation
of, could be developed in quite sophisticatedways,
almost INSTANTLY by Silicon Intelligences.
As fast as a TUNE could be made, it could be
developed in any number of styles now, with a
wonderful range of variations!
What good was it now to be "a great composer" the
ROMANCE WAS GONE. There was no longer
the old joy of sitting in the studio, writing out, and
recording these tunes, if 5 minutes later they could
be elaborated, and developed in works of great
symphonic proportions by machine intelligences!
Frankly, what good was a composer's human brain,
when scoresfor pattern re-arrangementin the many
styles ofmusic, excellentprogramsfor'personalizing'
one's own sequences, and clever novelty features,
were all written. What did a composer now do?
What could be composed that would not be so
quickly and easily imitated and developed? THIS
BECAME THE REAL CHALLENGE. Every
composer soon hoped to keep "them" guessing for
AT LEAST 2 weeks before his newest composition
was'DUPED'!...
This produced a GREAT EFFECT on musical
thought. It resulted in the necessity for more subtle
inventions on the part of composers. Or, what in
fact, they were doing as human intelligences - if
their next 'inspiration' (i.e., a personalized sequence
of melodic, rhythmic variations) could be so easily
and instantly created by "machine" intelligence?
All of this actually ADVANCED the ART OF
MUSIC, to a much higher level.
However, before this happened, composers had to
face something even more DISTURBING, that
writing these melodies, or 'germs' to be developed
--
the main activity of most composers --
was
NO LONGER that profoundly CREATIVE,
after all! It became clear that composing had
not meant isolating acoustic features, beginning
HERE with the SPECTRUM itself, discovering
its energies, and shaping. The unsettling truth was
that most approaches to creating music, BEGAN
with EXISTENT FIGURES -- melodies
snatched from the greatfragments of MUSICAL
MEMORY! What composing usually amounted
to, was a re-arranging and modifying of these
patterns, i.e., OTHER MEN'S TUNES, and
giving the a PERSONALIZED SEQUENCE
IN TIME. And, the Silicon Composers were now
doing this better andfaster than they could!
... For composers tofeel "worth anything" the music
they now made must explore areas of sensitivity,
for which NO SOFTWARE for INSTANT
DEVELOPMENT yet existed! Composers had
to GO IN AND LISTEN in ways NEVER
DONE BEFORE! They hear, think, and explore
the "unformulated" where CLUES were still
insufficient for synthesis!
The had also to try and UNDERSTAND now, in
the very deepest sense, "musical memory" -- how
music's many tunes, and melody traces matched
"listening mind's" memory traces -- rather than
simply snatching these melody fragments out of the
air, and re-arrangingthem in time.
They returned to the past also, and though about
some of the great early inventions in Music, which
were now taken for granted. They though about
Monteverdi, inventing the TREMOLO; Viadana,
the FIGURED BASS. The re-charged their
special musical sensitivity, to LNiVENT 8'
82
These quotes are taken from the section of Intelligent Life titled
Background to the Musical Intrigue. The exact date of authorship is not known,
but these words were likely written between 1980 and 1985-
87
While Amacher was writing about composers, creativity, and
the paradox of activities understood as solely possible via
exceptional human beings being transformed by Al models
of these behaviors producing more interesting results than
humans can make for themselves, these questions were being
dealt with in terms of performance and authenticity by the
record industry.
The curiously traumatic apex were the 1990 Grammy Awards
where Milli Vanilli won the "Best New Artist" category and were
then stripped of their award when it became clear that "the
artist" was not singing the songs, they were simply an image
enacted to position the audio representation in a marketable
way. The producer of Girl You Know It's True, Frank Farian,
to this day claims he hired them as dancers and that Fabrice
Morvan and Rob Pilatus (Milli Vanilli's representative duo)
began lip-syncing during a video shoot of their own accord.8
Among other reasons for suspicion, obvious to many music
industry professionals involved with the promotion of their
debut, Fab and Rob could barely speak English in 1989, never
mind sing without an accent.84 Clive Davis, the President of
Arista, the label that released Girl You Know It's True revealed
in a recent interview that Fab and Rob did not have a contract
with Farian that gave them any royalties from the over ii
million copies sold worldwide (as of 1989).85 Farian and Arista
profited enormously.
After their Grammy was stripped, Fab and Rob fell out, Rob
committed suicide, and Fab released a few records but seems
to primarily be occupied with endless profiles and interviews
about the scandal, most recently telling the story of their
extortion on "The Moth," an NPR storytelling program. 1
Starproduzent Frank Farian: "Deutschland Sucht Den
83
Superstar," Spiegel Online, November 14, 2010, http://www.spiegel.
de/kultur/musik/starproduzent- frank -farian- deutschland- sucht-densuperstar-und-findet-ihn-nicht-a- 72609o.html.
Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, I Want My MTV: The
84
Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (Dutton Adult, 2011).
362
85
"Girl You Know It's True: Milli Vanilli," accessed May 6, 2013,
http://whitgunn.freeservers.com/Davemusic/M/milli-vanilli/girl-youknow-its-true.html.
"FAB MORVAN of Milli Vanilli - The Official Site," accessed
86
May 6, 2013, http://fabmorvan.com/.
89
The technology for Karaoke was refined in the same periodthe late 1980s -and took hold of Asia in the early 199os, quickly
spreading to the rest of the world. While there are fundamental
differences and social inversions between Karaoke and secretly
lip-syncing, the feeling of pretending to be amidst audio is a
constant.87 But even as we enacted our own imaginaries of
performance in karaoke and were satisfied by the minor living
room spectacle of it all, the members of Milli Vanilli were
continuously shamed- we couldn't respect the scaling-up of
this social architecture and the idea that pop music was media
spectacle, and not a talent show was only permissible for "us"
and not for our media heroes.
By 2002, the recording industry was transformed by the
Internet, file sharing, MP 3 , et al and were in a panic. One tactic
to rectify their loss of control within the media landscape:
"American Idol," an elaborate talent show format aimed at
creating music industry stars via a crowd-sourced popular vote.
It went live on Fox in 2002; the first winner was Kelly Clarkson
whose prize was a major label record contract. Since then she
has sold 25 Million albums. With the show's popularity and
the financial success of its winners, there are now a handful
of similar programs on the air, relating to different labels and
genres.
From where we stand now, over twenty years after Milli
Vannili, it is absolutely the case that a group could exist and
win a Grammy with a singer who never came on stage. In fact,
since that time there has emerged an entire genre of "virtual
bands" who have animated or fictional characters "stage"
their shows for them. Gorrilaz, the most successful, was even
awarded a Grammy in "Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals,"
a category initiated in 1995 that was the container for Natalie
Cole's posthumous, virtualized, duet record with her father Nat
King Cole. The category has been eliminated as of 2012.
87
We can imagine this to be the case even as we listen to
recordings in a more generic sense. What is the difference between
"pretending along" and "entraining?" A stimulus constructing a shared
set of social permissions that can be enacted only within its sensation
present (entrainment's social consequence) vs. a stimulus where we use
perhaps the same stimulus to project ourselves as it's imaginary author.
88
IN
....
..........
sulaifmr
ra
0
**
The historical diagramming of the preceding pages locates
the schizoid psychology of contemporary audio as unfolding
in many locations at once. While the first visitors to the lawn
at Tanglewood were contemplating whether they were in fact
listening to "an orchestra" or a representation of one, dancers
in discos were euphorically experiencing monumentally louder,
immersive, and more affectively scintillating auralities than ever
before. Attendees to Grateful Dead shows were experiencing
something related - and record collectors and audiophiles were
attempting to produce private experiences to recollect and
produce vivid real/memory hybrids.
A knotted complex of relationships between people and
machines, and a multiplicity of paradox in the transformation of
how we trust our subjectivity confuse what "audio" has become.
Its ubiquity has proved a more radical force than anticipated,
and has not received the same surgical disambiguation as the
image.
Audio affords an uncomfortably intimate encounter with
representation, as our subjective acoustic memory, our sense
of place, our personal memories, our ways of thinking, feeling,
and being, spark together forming so quickly it's nearly
impossible to parse the resulting composites. We can embrace
all of these subjectifying forces, their difficulty and sensuality,
whose value or non-value and possible relations to a pre or
non-audio "reality" are often unknown and might ultimately
be unimportant.
Audio's utility is best imagined as in relation to the utility of
daydreams, a swimming pool, a site of poly- dimensional
osmosis; learning without the necessity of verification or truthtoward justification. But in the face of audio existing within
such a capitalized area of culture and our life, we will need
to resist this ease temporarily to develop a relationship that
captures all that can be possible in the air we can make, and
its capacity to imprint schemas with revolutionary implications.
93
Throughout these texts we've been considering audio to be
primarily a "representation", rather than a "reproduction" or
"music" or "sound" and this is a critical starting point.
We can consider that it may be a powerful tool to understand
this representation as inherently ancestral and as linked more
broadly to the current status of subjectivity's insight into the
absolute.
The potentiality of audio are in its address- of the air it produces
-and how, as a place, it exists within the oscillations between
our thinking, affect, our physiology, and its action. Audio are
always in a productive and ephemeral reciprocity with a social
architecture inhabiting it, even if we are alone. All of this is
contingent upon the lexicon of memories and desires with
which we ornament its presence.
Distilled: audio as a "thing" is a perceived change in the air, the
delta between a room with and without it.
Within this delta are the knots I've attempted to untangle. But
if we can keep this simple definition in mind, audio becomes a
tool. With this tool we can make temporary places that construct
a site of dialog between sense of self, ways of thinking, ways of
being alone, and ways of being together- an ephemeral social
architecture with power to transform us in ways no political or
philosophical solution can on its own.
The more we can learn and stimulate the role for audio that
most realizes our desire for the world we want and how it
feels to be there, to think there- the more we can embrace
the multiplicity that characterizes our time and locate our own
schematics for what will be a whole.
i'm not sure the nature of museums matters as much as what goes in them
they are like music in that they turn identity into space
and like concerts we go to museums because they give time
where does one place begin and one place end is becoming more
difficult to feel, anyway. thresholds increasingly difficult to notice
we should try. change is constant meaning everything
is always at stake, somewhere.
they are no longer mausoleums
there still aren't any silent discos
self-flagellating modernists after modernism
can scour into the future from the past
emptiness is not cold, it's body temperature.
museums are still quiet enough to have a conversation
and usually there isn't much else to do
this is one form of emptiness
entertainment where does it begin and end
desire is not a way of knowing to keep our mind from hearing itself
we go places to experience ourselves
in time
under the inspirational spell
of the full capacity of our senses
one form
of emptiness
i forget how sensitive you are
because i am reacting to the results
of how sensitive i am to you
i mean that in the best way
this is a problem a room can solve
a museum is a protector for the notion
that there are rooms we can make inside of our selves
that are so quiet
voices from the future are audible
even to folks like us
we still don't understand diseases of threshold
schizophrenia or autism
inside and outside, just outside or inside
where is it safe to be between inside and outside
some people feel every threshold
too strongly as if there were no rooms with a wall
there are at least eighteen thousand museums in the united states
what can we say about them
imagine an ocean that fits in the palm of your hand
then drop it into your imagination
make it endlessly bigger
when you can no longer contain the ocean
let it escape into the air enlarging further as a surface
you can move beneath
look down
and it's gone
an emergency room
that is global power
the hope to eliminate poverty
whatever that means to you
raising awareness is not the same problem
it was until the last drop of the twentieth century
museums are places where reflection is performed
human beings revealing to each other that
impressions are knowledge enough
that this is production enough
museums can be a space of tension
resistance to the sense of limited possibility
we receive in a world where quantification
is the precursor to all value
in this way, museums matter
more than what goes in them
until something goes in them
nature is not an algorithm
museums are for multiplicities
that can exist nowhere else
ideally museums are a place for the whole person-in-time
with all contradictions and impurity included
modernism failed humanity
this whiteness
in the end
turned out to be white-as-usual
dragging colonialism ai ad
in the sand, heard from a distance
another form of emptiness
Figures in Air
We will not attempt to define the primary qualities of audio,
but simply continue to strip-away, to move toward identifying
a way of thinking that can take us to a shared language for
doing so. What we are after is a model for differentiating the
qualia of audio as air as social architecture that is not limited to
individual subjectivity, but is within the bounds of a particular
time and space, can be gathered as a temporary intersubjective
absolute. What we can achieve by doing this is to de-trivialize
audio as a means to de-trivialize the importance of penetrating
our experience in ways that can result in conviction as to
reality that doesn't rely on knowledge structures beyond our
the intersubjective reality we hope to participate in (quantum
mechanics, for example). To get there we need to filter away
confusion as to the properties of the perceptual moment we
are locating.
First we must eliminate the notion that audio is technology.
While the quality of the air we identify as audio is manufactured
in an ongoing way by technology, the role technology and
architecture play is as an interface to the air. In this view, the
ideal technological and architectural interface should be capable
of more sensitivity than we are, and with a means of control
that affords human beings utilizing these tools to "tune" the air
with as much precision and subtlety as they are capable.
These tools can improve and reciprocollay "tune" us to greater
sensitivity. In this framework, every detail of the technology
does impact the resultant range of possible qualias and for
this reason of potentiality, technology matters enormously for
the production of audio. But even as the air is contingent on
technology, we can not mistake one for the other.
A partial list of nodes within the topography comprising the
interface:
-
Ancestral sound or "source"
-
Social conditions modulating the source's self-representation
-
Signal chain of capture or creation
-
Transubstantiation
-
Encoding or means of preparing the carrier media for
transubstantiation
-
Properties of the carrier media or virtual package (i.e. a 'file,"
plastic, metal, glass)
-
Possible transformations of the carrier media over time that alter
the trans-substance
-
Decoding or means of preparing the carrier media for
transubstantiation
-
Transubstantiation
.
Signal chain to a diffusing mechanism
-
Spatial diffuser (a technology that places sound into space via a
compressible substance - gas, liquid, or solid)
-
The aurality of the diffusion location
-
The acoustics of the location as shaped by a combination of gases,
liquids, and solids subject to physics of Earth (if on Earth)
-
Acoustic interference and intervention
-
Social and historicalconditions constricting the psychological range
of perceptions
-
Position of the listener's body in space
.
Spectral properties and temporal displacements of the listener's
ears, torso, head, and hair
These and related means of production are not where we will
find audio, nor the capacity to model and differentiate with
clarity the delta between a room with our without a particular
quality of air. They partially account for material contribution
to a total contingency of relating to audio as air or air as wind
with any particularity.
97
Attempting to locate these answers within the interface is a
fearful foreclosure of thought; an impasse to finding a means
of encountering what is beyond an ambivalent, totalizing
relativism. We must find a way to bypass this block by if we will
hope to develop a means of identifying "figures" in the air.8"
In the previous chapter audio is identified as a thing located at
the delta between air with it and air without it. We've also arrived
at the notion that the something that transfers to air across the
entirety of possible interface, that is enough to bloom in our
imagination as testimony of humanity, is a temporaneity.
So to find ourselves in a time and place, however contingent,
within which we can identify, savor, and construct a schema for
an audio "figure," we will need to find a means of characterizing
both of the above components as a resonant form, metastasizing
through air as a time-based representation. 90
How can we identify what is unchanging as we experience the
same artifact, a bit of recorded sound, represented again and
again, becoming audio?
We can try.
"Figures" is a revision made in 2012 by Meillassoux to his
89
previous use of the phrase "primary qualities" by which he means
absolute properties of things. Crucial to keep in mind is that these
properties are not claimed to be "absolute" across time and space, but
absolute within a framework of thinking that assumes reality to be
entirely contingent (i.e. other than what we think it is or actually is in one
moment of encounter)
90
Since the late 198os the composer Maryanne Amacher
discussed her work(s) as containing a collection "sound characters"
whose total contingency reflects these ideas in practice. Her "characters"
were not audio files or recordings, but temporary constructs in time and
space, subject to the entirety of that presents facticity.
1Its origin
2 The cause of its origin
3 Its history
4 Its qualities and attributes
5 Objects connected with it and related to it
6 Its use and applications
7 Its results and effects
8 What it explains and proves
9 its end or its future
10 Your opinion, the cause and motives of this opinion
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Beyond Blinking Binary
Many texts have been written in the past decade theorizing
sound, sound art, the sonic arts, listening, the soundscape,
audio culture, and within the recently-named field of sound
studies- which is a helpful container for the breadth of concerns
unfurled over the past fifteen year. Texts by Christoph Cox,
Alan Licht, Seth Kim-Cohen, Douglas Kahn, Jonathan Sterne,
Steven Connor, and others have become temporary wayfinders
in this just recently capable-of-peer-review area of study.
A nuanced and diverse cluster of histories and theories relating
to recording and recorded sound, aesthetic dimensions of
sound in architecture, and selective histories of "sound art"
along aesthetic and technological lines have been hatched
and interwoven. Physiologic, performative, poetic, political,
and philosophic lenses have filtered these lines into a range
of territories. The field is young and marginal enough that
many distinct positions have refreshingly been afforded a space
through a fresh claim, rather than oppositional critique.
The 2009 publication of Seth Kim-Cohen's In the Blink of
an Ear was a turning point in that it was the first decidedly
polemic, English-language monograph in the field that took
hold and was discussed in oppositional terms. We will use
Kim-Cohen's text as yet another filter with which to continue
our disambiguations, but via the intertwined histories of music,
sound art, and the visual arts.
Air Needs ajob Description
It is a compulsion of Capitalism to quantify via qualifying. The
word "music" has a particularly rich set of such qualifications,
as in "pop music" or "art music" or to replace "music" with
a new word, a sub-categorical signifier referencing a further
refinement as in "dub step" within "electronic music." To
differentiate the economic position of a music and its participants
101
as in "underground hip hop" or "indie rock." To distinguish a
relationship to a particular technology and it's cultural position
as in "circuit bending" or "synth pop." We could have fun with
this list for pages, but already the expansiveness is clear.
These categories are more an artifact of the audio industry's
spreadsheets, now digested and re-framed more creatively by
music writers and listeners seeking to differentiate movements
or establish a position within the sphere of comparative tastes
and identities.
These words often mask the recurrence of more embedded
compositional or performative factors that when identified can
function similarly as the topography identified in a previous
text as the "interface" for audio. These elements are many,
but particular rhythmic patterns, timbrel combinations, an
affective range, musical forms and structures, fashion or ethnic
identity of the performers, regionalism - or more composite
elements like the cultural point of entry for a particular age or
socioeconomic group's learned desires. 9'
In the 2000s there was a renewed movement to separate
some areas of artistic production involving sound from music.
Sound Art's recurrence is interesting in that the work often at
first self-identified as such had in many cases precursors under
previous renaming attempts. In the 1970s Sound Sculpture and
Sound Installation were both in use as descriptors of a wide
variety of practices that produced sound or referenced sound
as an idea.
These and other terms co-existed within less ear-specific terms
like Installation Art, Media Art, New Media Art, and many
others. Often if the art work was in some way performed
it might be referred to as Noise Music or just Noise. If the
performer was from Japan it might be called Japanoise. Had
the same audio used been released on CD in the late 199os, it
might simply have been called Ambient, or in the early 198os,
New Age.
For example: heterosexual-identifying pre-teen girls and
91
boys and "boy bands" where the boys identify as the powerful, desired
performer and girls identify with the screaming fan, meanwhile often
neither party has developed an actual sexualized interest.
Yet for the entirety of his career, John Cage's practice was
received as being within Music. 4'33" was premiered in a
concert hall, not an art gallery- during the 1970s to mid-198os
his experiments with written and spoken language did not
force him into exile from music to poetry. In the last five years
of his life he received and completed a handful of commissions
for symphony orchestra (performing in European concert halls,
primarily). 92
93
In 1968, Steve Reich, an anti-Modernist composer en route
to co-establish the mainstreaming of musical Minimalism, was
able to suspend a microphone between speakers, let it swing
and produce feedback until the swinging stopped and the
piece would come to an end, and called it Pendulum Music, an
assertion.9 4 Alvin Lucier's 1970 Musicfor Solo Performer which
involved a meditating performer's alpha waves triggering
transducers coupled to percussion instruments also asserted
that even this is still music.
Lucier's 1977 Music on a Long Thin Wire began as a musical
performance 95 and was commissioned by the Live Electronic
Music Ensemble of the Crane School of Music in upstate NY.
After several concerts the work became an installation. On
Lucier's own website it is now listed as a "sound installation"
yet in 1980 it was released on an LP with the work "recorded
by the composer" with no performers mentioned.96
In 1992 "the work" was again released, this time on a CD. The
liner notes, which describe the technical means of producing
the sound (which is not included in the LP) and make no
disclaimer or modification to the assumption that playback
of the CD adequately represents "the work," the assumption
we generally have about Music's relation to CD, not sculpture
92
Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond
(Cambridge University Press, 1999).11
Larry Solomon, "John Cage Chronological Catalog of
93
Music," John Cage Chronological Catalog of Music, accessed May 6,
2013, http://solomonsmusic.net/cageopus.htm#John%2oCage%20
Alphanumeric%2oCatalog.
94
Ibid.12
95
"Alvin Lucier - Music On A Long Thin Wire," Discogs, accessed
96
May 6, 2013, http://www.discogs.com/Alvin-Lucier-Music-On-A-LongThin-Wire/release/757891.
103
or sound art. Lucier's practice has been focused on revealing
the sonic characteristics of objects, instruments, and in a quite
minimal way narrating an exploration of them. If that is where
we can most clearly place his work, then by contemporary
standards, he would have made his first work of Sound Art
in 1962 with Elegyfor Albert Anastasia a tape piece where the
sounds contained on the tape were mostly too low frequency
to hear and had the effect instead of revealing the properties of
the loudspeaker playing it back.
There are a variety of works throughout the 198os and
1990s where one could re-frame the piece as "Sound Art,"
though Lucier, Professor of Music (composition) at Wesleyan
University and with a career standing within the field of Music
since the early 196os, what reason would he have? What would
we gain as visitors to the work by thinking of it as Sound
Art? What do we gain if we think about it as Music? Why are
we so suggestible to this type of categorical hypnosis? Why in
20007, the time of his websites design (and last update) did he
bother classifying works originally referred to as Music, Sound
Installation?9' 99 "*
Cage was born in 1912, Lucier in 1931 and Reich 1936. A slightly
younger generation found themselves less able to hold onto
the word "music." This was primarily due to Reich and other
proponents of musical Minimalism's success at marginalizing
formal experimentation and replacing it with repetition. This
move aligned it more closely with rock and popular forms and
did away with the biggest perceptual hurdle listeners to Cage's
music of the time, for example, would need to overcome: that
the temporal structures were often entirely "non-musical" in
the sense that they were not attempting to play paddy-cake
with inherited acculturated models of rhythmic expectation.
The late 1990s until -2008 contained a period of renewed
97
interest in sound as material in the visual arts and was the latest attempt
to strongly identify Sound Art as distinct from music. Sound Installation,
at the time, felt like a mid-point, as to claim to be a "sound artist" in
2000 felt both grandiose and vague.
Lucier though he does not refer to the setup of his pieces as
8
sculpture")
Alvin Lucier, Music on a Long Thin Wire (Lovely Music, 1992).
99
i00
For a reference on what was thought of as Sound Sculpture in
1975 see: Sound Sculpture: A Collection of Essays by Artists Surveying
the Techniques, Applications, and Future Directions of Sound Sculpture
(A.R.C. Publications, 1975).
The post-Webern continuum began with a rhythmic pointillism
and signaled the beginning of a new imagination for what
time-based forms could be in music. Webern simultaneously,
quietly, escalated timbre from footnote to text. This is perhaps
the origin for Cage's interest in sounds being allowed to be
themselves without hierarchy. Minimalism's rejection of form
will be explored more deeply later, but what is important
here is that this renunciation of a perceived inscrutable, elitist
"formalism" neutralized the option for a younger generation of
composers to continue to successfully identify as such.
These words are artifacts or responses to paradigmatic shifts in
how music is defined. Though beyond what we will do in this
text, if one analyzes works of sound art and works of music,
often these categories are not accurately distinguishing between
the range of thinking, affect, or by the people involved.
At times after, before, beneath, or late-comer is the economy of
commissions, performances, categories established by granting
agencies, and so forth. We are talking about job descriptions,
not labor or philosophy. Were there no competition for
exposure or a living wage, the trajectory of these terms would
be quite different.
But there is still value in going deeper into possible clarifications
artists attempt to have their work understood. Before we leave
this background intrigue interlude en route to Kim-Cohen's
text, a stab at further distinction.
ere we are referring to the Austrian composer Anton Webern
1o 1
(1883-1945)
105
We can generalize the desire to re-identify beyond music or
composition to three motivations:
*
To ask for a type of listening that would
include a referential mode that would hope for
a decoding of the sounds used as meaningful
beyond their temporal and timbrelfeatures and
relationships to the other sounds in the work
(i.e. notjust "organizedsound" but meaningful
and possibly also organized sound)
-
To ask the listener to discount any musical
criteria they might apply to the work, which
could discredit it as skilled or effective within
any existing range of musical expectations
-
To gain access to another cultural sector or
marketplace within which they feel their
work would be better understood, better
supported, adequately compensated, or in some
way received more openly than in the music
communities they were aware of or existed.
102
Here it is useful to think of the relativity of the term
"experimental music" in that what will be experimental for one person,
based on experience, will not be experimental for another. To remove
the category of music from sound makes an assumption that a perceiver
should not identify or relate to the sound as music, even if the listener
might find it quite natural given their listening habits and existing schemas
for what music is. And by 1975 most people involved with Sound
Sculpture or Sound Art would have already digested John Cage and
decided that any sound could be music, and so the idea of "experimental"
had already been trumped, at least linguistically.
Ilk
Eyes Wide Open
Polemics have been one of the defining factors in establishing the
nature of experimental music' 3 and has also been a feature of
Sound Art and it's precursor attempts to escape an identification
with music, it's culture, and ways of listening. Such arguments
are useful in presenting a justification for production that
refuses to participate in the dominant paradigm. The polemic
is also useful for communicating this position to the general
public or a specialist audience in another field for whom the
origins and dynamics of the conflict are unknown.
Sound Art is an ongoing, loosely collected diaspora of
experimentalist thought and action involving audio, primarily.
Its occasional polemicism against music masks the desire,
inevitability, and necessity for reconciliation with both the
music and visual art contexts, their histories, theories, and
current practices. Without this embrace it will only continue
to be, like the locust, with it's once every ten to fifteen year
temporary bursts - and then forgotten until the next. Sound
Art has repeated failed to interweave itself deeply into both
worlds, though in the past five years there are some positive
signs that this could be possible. Nevertheless, sound art has
remained askew from the richer discourses present in the fields
it has identified itself as between.' 4
In the Blink of an Ear is an attempt to reconcile sound art with
the visual arts and posits sound artists as a band of lost souls
practicing a rabid phenomenological "sound-in-itself"-ism.
These folks are pitted against those artists working with sound,
who according to Kim-Cohen (articulated here in inverse) did
not miss the "conceptual turn" of the 196os.05
I am using this term broadly and use it because "experimental"
103
is a word contingent on the listener's experience rather than any history
or methodology
Now that the subject is no longer "categories" Sound Art will
104
cease to be capitalized.
105
Kim-Cohen, Seth, In the Blink of an Ear, Introduction Page xx
109
For Kim-Cohen the conceptual turn is articulated by the
blooming of Duchamp's practice which he understands to have
"adjusted the focus from an art of at or out to an art of about."'
The text serves to situate sound art squarely within art history,
with music and music-thinking being an inhibition to this full
embrace.
The book is a much-needed stake in the ground and with
eloquent post-critical density he establishes the need to think
about the act of sound recording and recordings as the complex
artifacts they are, carrying with them much to think "about" as
well as to listen "through." As we've been discussing in previous
texts, this should be taken as a given when talking about audio,
regardless of content or context.'0 7
Other author's have diagrammed this territory in the past, but
not as explicitly in dialogue with art history. *8 This has been
in dire need since Greenberg's Art and Culture*9 and it is of
crucial importance that a situating of sound art within the postwar dialectical transition in art history, criticism, and philosophy
has happened.
Without diminishing praise this text deserves, In the Blink of an
Ear can also be read as a reenactment that positions sound art
re-argued within a dichotomy of another time, aligned with the
Derrida's critique of phenomenology played out in the same
period. Kim-Cohen's intent was to bring sound art into the
present moment by returning to the bygone in order to reclaim
for sound art what he feels was the missed wormhole to the
aesthetics of his present.
Its a similar framework as the film Bill and Ted's Excellent
Adventure"0 : Kim-Cohen is Rufus; Bill and Ted are sound
artists. I've annotated the synopsis in all caps:
106
Ibid.
xvii
As part of his description of Clement Greenberg's anti-3D
107
perspective he makes a distinction between work that is about a window,
for example, as opposed to art works that suggest looking through that
same window.
io8
(Sterne 2003)
109
(Greenberg 1971)
Herek, Stephen. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Adventure,
Comedy, Sci-Fi, 1989. Synopsis written by Todd Baldridge
110
With only a few days before their high-school
graduation, Bill S. Preston, esquire and Ted
'Theodore' Logan are doomed to flunk out
of school [THEY HAVE MISSED THE
CONCEPTUAL TURN]. The history teacher,
Mr. Ryan, decides to give Bill and Ted a chance
[A BOOK MUST BE WRITTEN TO HELP
THEM UNDERSTAND]. If they can ace an
oral exam on the topic of how a famous historical
personality might react to modern times, they will
be allowed to pass [SOUND ARTISTS NEED
TO UNDERSTAND ART HISTORY AND
RENOUNCE PHENOMENOLOGY]. If not,
Ted'sfather willplace Ted in military school, thereby
disbanding the Wyld Stallyns, the heavy metal
band that was formed by Bill and Ted [IF THEY
DON'T THEY WILL NO LONGER HAVE
ACCESS TO THE ART WORLD]. Bill and
Ted get help from an unexpected source: Rufus, an
Emissary from the Future [KIM-COHEN]. It
seems that in Rufus' time, Bill and Ted's music is
the basis of all existence [BECAUSE "SOUND
ART" MATTERS IN THE FUTURE], and
if the Wild Stallyns are disbanded, Rufus's world
will no longer exist [IF SOUND ART GOES
AWAY IT WILL BE DIFFICULT TO GET
BOOKS PUBLISHED ABOUT IT]"'. Bill and
Ted are whisked off in a time machine to retrieve
a few historical charactersfor their oral exam so
they can pass, but Bill and Ted soon discover that
finding the historicalcharactersand getting them to
the high school won't be easy [RECLAIMING
HISTORY ISN'T A SOLUTION].
But his analysis of music and sound art history and their
interwoven trajectories is problematic in its narrow, inadequately
contingent definitions and exemplars, perhaps occluding the
arrival of the reader into a sense of greater possibility for either
field.
To reiterate a point from the beginning of the chapter:
Capitalism requires the quantification of qualities - and one way to
generate new markets is to construct new categories or packaging for
substances known previously by another name. This is meant generally,
not as a criticism of Kim-Cohen, who is simply subject to the same
economic and professional necessity to produce as we do.
111
Kim-Cohen summarizes his position simply in the introduction
by describing the type of art he is promoting:
... a non-cochlear sonic art responds to demands,
conventions, forms, and content not restricted to
the realm of the sonic. A non-cochlear sonic art
maintains a healthy skepticism toward the notion
of sound-in-itself When it - whatever it is - is
identifiedwith-out question and without remainder,
we have landed on a metaphysics, a belief system, a
blind (and deaf)faith."2
He continues to describe how he understands his role in this
movement by writing that he hopes "to lead the ear away from
the solipsism of the internal voice and into a conversation with
the cross talk of the world." He softened this statement in a
previous paragraph by establishing that he believes the most
successful sonic art will engage both cochlear and non-cochlear
dimensions, but the overwhelming thrust of his book betrays this
moderation with an "anti-cochlearism" that reads at times as
granting an essentialist relationship toward its own framework
as any Helmholtzian drone composer has ever been."3
His argument is fully launched against dogmatic metaphysics
of any kind and to this end, he notably dismantles the work of
Pierre Schaefer and Francisco Lopez. The readings he gives of
their practices and writings, however, discount both of their
more complexifying positions. He ignores the relationship to
taxonomy that both maintained in parallel to each's dwellings
in particular romantic relationships with listening and audio
essences. I'll return to both Schaeffer and Lopez a bit deeper
into the text as the topography unfolds.
In
2011 I interviewed Lopez after we had completed working
on his EMPAC commission Hyper-Rainforest, in part to create
an opportunity for him to answer Kim-Cohen. In discussions
over the preceding weeks, Lopez indicated that they had never
met, and as far as he knew Kim-Cohen had never attended
one of his concerts. While Lopez has made quite polemic and
unambivalent statements on his website and in publication- his
Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a NonCochlear Sonic Art, 1st ed. (Continuum Pub Group, 2009).7
Ibid
113
112
way of speaking about these issues are extremely subtle and
far less totalizing than one might imagine from his portrayal in
either his own or Kim-Cohen's writing." 4
At several points in the interview Lopez is asked in different
ways, what he believes is transferred between a location where
a recording is made and a concert situation. One of his answers
posits a third category (i.e. not cochlear or non) that is as "noncochlear" as any definition approached by Kim-Cohen's:
When I work on a performance or live presentation
... And this is based on field recording on almost
every time. In order to explain what I try to do
I will compare to a nature documentary. We have
information and we rely on the indexicality of
what is happening. We see the animals, how they
live, what they do. We hear a number of things
that explain what happens there and show certain
layers of reality that are used to explain something
biological,etc.. In my situation[work] we are missing
many layers of that reality and we are aware of
that. What I am interested in doing in this possible
transposition or translation or transportation of
something from that rainforest to a concert is not
that form of representation. That happens more
or less immediately and you will imagine an
environment. This is there and you will do that
anyway. What I'm interested in is taking aspects of
that reality that are reallyfocused, that are real, and
arefocused on the details of that reality- in this case
sonic reality -details, texture the nuances of what
happens. Not only will we recognize and hear the
sound of a frog, and we hear, we understand, we
imagine, we know it is a frog. I want the sound of
the frog to become an entity by itself somehow in
the sense that there is so much detail and vividness
that it is not only that it has sound qualityfor the
information of "this is a frog" but that somehow
there is an aspect of "hyper-reality" in our actions
ofperception and attention to that reality, with our
without media, with our without recording, there
is that possibility of focusing on that matter or
substance of that reality. On many different levels
114
Francisco Lopez, "Essays (Section)," Essays, May 1, 2013,
http://www.franciscolopez.net/essays.html.
113
this is a complicated thing to do. All aspects of this
substance of reality is crucial to what I try to do. I
am not interested in showing or playing back an
environment that can be recognized, but in bringing
a listening into a world that is a virtual world
of sound, even when we can recognize the sounds,
particularly in that case. It is a world that has, or
when we can, that tries to have the essence of that
reality, this is what is the most important element.
There is a second or third or fourth layer that come
together with the other representation, symbolic,
indexical aspects of reality that brings all of these
different aspects together. Many of the decision I
take compositionally are taken to this end. "'
Lopez articulates that his work's primary concern is to be
an opportunity for listeners to integrate several, layered
relationships to a sound that together can produce what
he is calling a "hyper-reality." By choosing this term - and
titling his work "Hyper-Rainforest" we can imagine Lopez is
aligning himself with legacy of Boudrillard and the discourse of
simulation, but even more specifically with the recent writing of
Nobuyoshi Terashima and John Tiffin who have been for over
a decade making the claim that "HyperReality" is becoming the
dominant form of experience:
As time goes by, the difference between what is
really real, and what exists in effect, but not infact,
could blur. People could come to live in a world
in which they cannot readily distinguish whether
what they see, hear, smell and touch is derivedfrom
the physical world or mediated by information
technology"'
To create works using recorded sound that attempt to go
beyond any one layer of a listener's response (as signifier, as
a typology to be indexed, as a sensuality, etc) - to integrate
them into something more - this is Lopez's conception of his
attempt. He does not refuse the referentiality of his recordings,
nor claim that an essence of reality is transferred between places.
He is simply convinced that in shaping recorded sound and
115
April
Francisco Lopez, Francisco Lopez Interviewed by Micah Silver,
30, 2011.
116
Nobuyoshi Terashima and John Tiffin, HyperReality: Paradigm
for the Third Millenium (Routledge, 2001). 26
producing it as audio it is possible for a listener to explore
these relations and with enough focus, go beyond what we are
naturally inclined to do when confronted with any sensation
that whose origin is unclear: identify and categorize." 7
How meaningful would music be if we only listened to it and
thought: I am listening to an extremely nice piano and afamous man
singing? This, I suppose would be a non-cochlear way of listening
to John Lennon- but for what? In order not to experience the
inter-personal or affective quality of the experience and impose
a kind of self-autonomy reduced to language? In doing so we
imagine a room without air, a room where we can not know
how or why we are there, experiencing as much as is possible
given the innumerable factors shaping the duration. Lopez
continues:
Sounds are carriers of meanings and information,
obviously. That's how you might view our
predominant use of recording, especially if talking
about naturalsounds or music.. .that is the natural
thing to happen. Everyone has an awareness that
there are different types of sound. . the question is
how much we focus on which layer of reality the
sound contains - and this is about acknowledging
going beyond the symbolic."'
In the Blink of an Ear refuses the relational characteristics of
enacting music as a social and spatial phenomenon - its function
as a producer of social architecture. By doing so he guts his text
of the accumulated findings of thirty years of ethnomusicology,
more recent developments in music cognition and performance
studies." 9 Further it ignores the paradox that Cage, who is held
as the exemplar of "not music" was able to operate during his
career primarily in quite strictly musical contexts, and while
disparaged by that community, taken as serious-enough a
challenge to be disparaged actively, something no sound artist
can claim at the moment.
In the later text on the idea of schema, we will see that one way
117
to think of this response is in terms of Jean Piaget's Schema Theory.
118
Ibid
See (Slobin 1993), (Leman 2012), (Cross 1999) among others
119
115
In order to distinguish "sound art" from music, he over-defines
and simplifies the complex history of music to a confined view
one might find prevailing amongst gong-ho music conservatory
undergrads. This "music" he finds is an a-historical straw man
and the example composers he chooses allows him to ignore
many figures contemporaneous to those he highlights who
would confound his argument.
To stick with major figures unaccounted for and expand upon
our earlier discussion of Lucier, Cage, and Reich: how would he
reconcile his definition of music with a work like Stockhausen's
Sternklang (Park Music for Five Groups) of 1971 which is as
rigorously cochlear as non, but in a way different from the
reductionist conceptualism of Kim-Cohen's originary sound
artist, Robert Morris? There would hardly have
in the world at that time more identified as a
"music" than Stockhausen (he was even on the
Beatles album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
been anyone
composer of
cover of The
Band").
To continue with Stockhausen as a possible confound, he
also created sound-producing objects used in performance
to playback audio - in 1958 - prior to Lucier. He created a
rotating speaker table - an inversion of the transubstantiating
record player, and used this in a multichannel performance.
This predates contemporary works of sound art utilizing similar
principles by fifty years."*
While
Kim-Cohen gestures
toward African-American
musicians, primarily via Delta Blues,"' he fails to deal with
the work of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians (AACM) or how one might best understand
the emergence of Bebop as Charlie Parker's contribution to a
"conceptual turn" in Jazz, most certainly in bloom during his
chosen start-date of 1948.
He also never mentions Earle Brown, who from the early
1.Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music:
Technology, Music, and Culture (Routledge, 2008).68
121
Delta blues has a special significance for the chapters in this
text discussing audio and representation - as perhaps more than any
other genre of music its early recorded history has been fetishized by
mostly upper middle-class white Americans and Europeans for whom the
imagination of
120
1950S was exploring form and notation, not as a Greenbergian
exercise, but as a social exercise to bring composer, performer,
and audience into "warmer" relations."' Brown's early press
photos depicted him standing in front of a sign that simply
said "LISTEN" - quietly Brown was performing a long-term
intervention within classical music. Other examples that would
have been interesting for him to resolve: Alvin Curran's Maritime
Rites, Luigi Nono's Prometheo, Cornelius Cardew and Frederic
Rzewski's trajectory and oscillation between experimental
music and radical politics." 3
He also avoids the complexifying aesthetic positions of both
Maryanne Amacher and Pauline Oliveros, two major figures
working between cochlear and non; also both taking layered
positions that can be understood as feminist. In different ways,
both established territory that was beyond the dichotomy the
referent vs. the essential.
Since it wasn't a battle written at the time, Kim-Cohen fights on
behalf of sound against Clement Greenberg in retrospect. But
as Greenberg was anti-three dimensional illusion in painting,
Kim-Cohen's argument is passively anti-temporal in sound art,
relocating "time" to history rather than lived experience.
His treatment of the artists he posits are non-cochlear forebearers is lacking in any analysis of their temporality. In
describing Robert Morris's work, the temporal dimension is
not in the contents of the recorded sound used (the box being
made), but in the differential means of his work being exhibited
in several locations- that context changes the meaning. He
writes that "Time, in turn, introduces history, which introduces
the additionally expanded situation of culture: of sociality,
politics, gender, class, and race" but does not address sound
in Morris's work as a material that constructs, when attended
to by an observer, a temporal quality that is, if attended to, a
critical aspect of how the work would be engaging in KimCohen's definition of its temporality." 4
Unpublished documentary on Earle Brown produced by his
122
widow Susan Sollins-Brown.
123
For an in-depth discussion of the AACM and conceptualism
in the composing and improvising of African-American composers see:
(Lewis 2008)
124
(Kim Cohen, 2009) 59
117
He fights on behalf of his non-cochlearist vision of sound art
against Clement Greenberg in retrospect. But as Greenberg
was anti-three dimensional illusion in painting, Kim-Cohen's
argument is anti-temporal in sound art, relocating "time" to
history rather than in the duration of an encounter with air the
work produces.
In his reading of Pierre Schaeffer, he does not acknowledge
that Schaefer's contribution and perspective to thinking about
ways of listening that go far beyond the four-fold hierarchy he
constructs that does privilege an acousmatic perspective, but was
intended more as a theory for how to composer than a farreaching philosophical statement on sound or audio." 5
But Schaefer was also perhaps the first to attempt a taxonomic
relationship to audio, which counter to his position on how to
listen, indicates a much broader conception of what recorded
sound is and how it functions syntactically in time, especially
when leveraged toward an intention of art while still attempting
to maintain its identity as music. Schaefer in 1952:
Photography,whether thefact be denied or admitted,
has completely upset painting,just as the recording
of sound is about to upset music .... For all that,
traditional music is not denied; any more than the
theatre is supplanted by the cinema. Something new
is added: a new art of sound. Am I wrong in still
calling it music?"'
In retrospect he might have chosen different words than "upset"
or "supplant" since what's emerged is more along the lines of
"transformed" or "re-figured." But for all of his historicization
as a polemical thinking on listening, for him, he was making
music and his approach was not intended as a negation or
replacement, but an augmentation- a contribution to a field of
possibility.
125
1. Eric F. Clarke Professor of Music University of Sheffield,
Ways of Listening : An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical
Meaning: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning
(Oxford University Press, 2005).
126
lost source!! find!! 1952
We should be careful not to remove the multiplicity and paradox
that artists encounter living through ideas and sensations- and
Schaefer must be considered as a paradoxical figure more than
polemical, nevermind an essentialist anti-Christ.
Schaeffer's work should also be judged by its legacy, which has
largely been in the fields of sound synthesis and compositional
thinking that is interested in de-composition of sound to
components and then their recombinatory possibilities. To
give some indication of the breadth of Schaefer's research
and the reduction present in the book at hand, Michel Chion's
meta-guide to Schaeffer, Guide to Sound Objects claims to have
"reduced" Schaeffer's text for simplicities sake to one hundred
concepts.2 7
The last dimensions notably absent from In the Blink of an Ear
is any clear distinctions between or definitions of sound, audio,
and music. Air doesn't figure into the world view established
by his text, though it is the binding medium of audio's social
potential and ongoing function. Signal and perception are
interlinked mediumlessly and as such can, and are described
as if in an isolated dichotomy. In part this may account for
the limited definition of music's existent relational qualities preconceptual turn.
He defines sound art in the negative, as what music refuses to
accept, but with music defined in such a confined way, that
leaves sound art far too much space to define on its own, and
too little overlap with activities indivisible from its production.
Time-based formal relationships between how music and
sound function are ignored. Audio and sound seem not to
be distinguished and are used interchangeably, yet the art he
is writing about is almost exclusively audio-based, and more
specifically playback.
127
Michel Chion, Guide Des Objets Sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et La
Recherche Musicale (Buchet Chastel, 1994).10
119
The missing piece is the medium, which is more than anything
else what defines sound as part of the post-conceptual, relational,
everything-matters-ism that characterizes the location he
attempts to position the sonic arts.
We've sprinted through a critique of this book in order to take
the temperature of the water we have been swimming in thus
far and so the reader might better understand the context for
this project, and the historical and philosophical stakes in play.
Before moving on: In the Blink of an Ear is perhaps the most
important book to emerge in sound studies - and none of what's
written here diminishes that in the least. Kim-Cohen builds a
universe that has caused a multitude of sparks, and most likely
he did so in full knowledge of its particularity and bias. And to
honor that, similarly unfettered response can only provoke us
all to live up to one of his chapter titles: Be More Specific.
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For it could be that contemporary philosophers
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Quentin Meillassoux, Alain Badiou, and Ray Brassier, After
128
Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (Continuum, 2010).7
121
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Why Time-Based Art Takes Time
We talk about activities as if some of them take time and others
don't, when we know that we can never experience anything
that doesn't have a duration, whether we savor and put it to
memory or not. Whether we are dreaming and time is of a
different form, daydreaming, underwater, in dense fog.
When we are talking about "time-based art" it is a way to talk
about and emphasize that a human being has done something
wherein "time" is a material shaped, as we apply our attention
to it, to some degree we consume or "take [time]" that shape.
But as a perceiver we experience the sense of being present
with this sculpted-in-time-ness and we develop a relationship
to it or not, it transforms us in some way or not. We don't seem
to imagine clearly or know the time it took a human being to
sculpt.
With some works we might encounter them and immediately
feel aligned with it's temporaneity, it's new present. We arrive
to it, somehow already prepared and just jump in and take it.
Other works we resist or recoil - why?
Art making and receiving in time is so mysteriously integrated
cognitively that it remains unconquered by scientific
understanding of "what it is" and "why it works." But we don't
need this information. Why do we want it? What will it tell us
about ourselves?
Perhaps only the part of our brain that has its own, acculturated
desires for scientific verification longs for this. We have
tremendous insecurity surrounding our subjective impressions
if we can't back them up with "fact" and for experience of
reality, only science has authority. This is a cultural accident,
yet another contingent phenomenon - not the logical evolution
of human being discovering what it means to be alive on
planet Earth with these bodies; living and dying and sensing
123
and thinking and being confused. See Keiser (1986) for an
interesting study of a society where scientific understanding is
of no relation to social norms and curiosities.
For the sake of argument, let's assume we all want to be
the most broadly experienced, flexible, and ingenious human
beings we can. That would mean we'd need to learn, all the
time- we could not miss an opportunity to grow our sense of
the possible.
Yet as a society we resist experience as if were poisonous when
it doesn't immediately jive with our existent sense of "what's
good" or "what fits." We've grown to desire reification of
our existing frameworks to keep our identity and its cultural
trajectory settled. Doesn't this make us toddlers? What are we
so scared of?
What if we return to this ideal of fearless and constant learning
and take that seriously. We would first need to decide to go
beyond judgments and into a process of understanding what
we can learn from the thing we can't accept. Or find what
disgusts us and kiss it till we find love? This whole thing being here - it's all some kind of arrangement marriage in the
end. Who reading this chose to be born? Chose to be human?
Chose to be American during the Bush years?!
So if we want to get a handle on the possible we have to accept
that the process of accommodation takes time - lots of time - and
it means returning to the thing we don't relate to and finding a
relationship to it. It means finding the part of ourselves that can
actually relate in a direct way, not appreciate from a distance as
an acceptable other, believing an expert.
This is the ethic of art as learning.
125
[
'II B"L
ilI*ii r
inrii
IFlIF
Time-Based
Formal Imagination
After Minimalism
I say that nothing is incomprehensible. When you
have onefact after another, you can maybe describe
them by a law that will be constantfor a certain
duration; you could also say that they have no
connection. But infact, you can never prove, on the
basis of one instant, what must be in thefollowing
instant. You cannot make a necessary relation
between two moments of time. Because rationality
is intimately connected to the disconnection of time,
that's all. And that's why, when you are rational,
you have an incredible imagination. Why are we
rational creatures with imagination? Imagination
is supposed to be the creation of fictions or
of illusion, but why do we have imagination,
what Malebranche called la folle du logis? For
rationality, imaginationis said to be craziness. But
we are rational and we have imagination. Why?
Because in fact they're the same thing: rationality
is just the capacity to be directly connected to a
hyperchaos which has absolutely no limits. So, the
problem in understanding ultimate reality is not to
understandsome ultimate reason of rationality;it is
to understand that rationality is the understanding
that there is no ultimate reason."'9
"Minimalism is a tool to achieve fulfillment in
life. It is a tool to achieve happiness, which is (let's
face it) what are all looking for. We all want to be
happy. Minimalism can help. There are no rules in
minimalism. Rather, minimalism is simply about
stripping away the unnecessary things in your life
so you can focus on what's important."S3
129
Q Meillassoux/F. Hecker/R. Mackay. "Q. Meillassoux/F.
Hecker/R. Mackay Conversation at Chez Meillassoux, Paris, 22.7..2010."
Urbanomic, July 22, 2010.
Joshua Fields, and Ryan Nicodemus. Minimalism: EssentialEssays.
130
Asymmetrical Press, 2012.
127
The only rationale for minimalism's use in this Chapter's title is
as a starting pistol. By the mid-196os, and lets arbitrarily choose
the publication of Judd's Specific Objects (1965), there can be
no claim to a "next" cultural movement without resorting to
a personalized notion of what would be new. The spirit of
revolutionary overthrow of the 1950S culture was happening
in art, music, dance, philosophy, religion, politics, linguistics,
computer science. For each field there was a spray of vectors
and which aspects of a human being's experience charges them
to narrow toward a particular parameter to mentate on and
upend is best dealt with via psychoanalytic biography; perhaps
ethnography. But the collective thrust and outpouring, moving
toward the linguistic and against the phenomenal, deepening
the gap between, is uncanny.
Why
the
experimentalism
and
speculation
applied to
composition, or to rephrase Judd a bit: partial relations, became
uglied and semi-disqualified from critical discourse is important
to understand where cultural production stands at the moment,
in particular in relation to the economy and any possibility of
disambiguating art and design. "Design" should also be applied
to the time-based arts operating as pseudo-diverse reifications
of existing products whether the author's permit, know, or
embrace their instrumentalization or not.
Hal Foster's Design and Crime covers much ground in terms of
the current status. His critique of Seabrook's text Nobrow and
his warnings over the "pragmatic ambivalence" and co-option
of art as but a sub-brand of the "total design" experience that
has been re-sold to the public at large (he sees this as the reemergence of Art Nouveau).13
The frictionless absorption of Minimalist and Concept Art
into hotel and corporate lobby decor is only one indication of
the economy's agnostic relationship to any previously foughtfor rhetoric over the meaning of an art work by artists and
theorists. To return to 1965 for an unfortunate example, we
can imagine how seamlessly Joseph Kosuth's FIVE WORDS
IN BLUE NEON (which is exactly those five words in blue
131
Hal Foster, Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes (Verso,
2003).13-26
neon on a wall) could be absorbed into the decor of not only
lobbies full of Barcelona chairs, but any bar where someone
there is looking at pitchfork.com. Seabrook's analysis of the
globalized "nobrow" only has to be re-frame a bit: art is cool.
Identity is selling well.
Marketing and design professional, unlike art professionals,
do not gain their cultural capital by taking establishing a
position in a public debate regarding their work's meaning or
conveyance. They are rewarded for quantifiable and repeatable
results. An exception to this is the value of the cultural capital
of "being an artist" relocated practicing or becoming brand to
the design fields (celebrity perfume) or in design products and
their authors being misconstrued or misconstruing themselves
as artists: Bruce Mau is Foster's example."'
We can understand the cultural position of design similarly to
the cultural position of science: the existence of the discipline
is not based on an exploration of what their production means
nor how it means, but that the outcome can be quantified and
that this measure yields the appropriate result: continuation of
the discipline, which requires further financing from the public,
either via direct consumption (for design) or subsidy via belief
(science).
This line of thinking brings us back to Meillassoux's correlationism
and the codicil of modernity that keeps non-scientists from
interrogating the absolute and trusting it isn't only their
subjectivity which constitutes them as a subject.
What I observe is that the education industry, along with art
of the museum, gallery, and university contexts emerged mid20th century with a near-hegemonic formal imagination based
on correlation, but carrying a similarly neutral credo of being
"even better than the real thing," via a web of correlated subidentities with the authority for the mesmerized to invoke the
belief in a causality when correlational chains toward meaning,
like correlation in statistics are incapable, except by accident or
the application of the third force.
132
Foster, Hal. Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes. Verso,
22-24
129
2003.
For this area of art the type of sub-identities chosen and the
web produced by their intra-modulations is understood to be
meaning with our subjectivity relegated to embracing the art
work as proof of meaning rather than either a source of meaning
or a mirror for meaning we hope to locate and the state of
exception art affords and object afford the chance to witness
it as exterior. This is a denial of an inner worthy of attention
and defensively emphasizes exteriority as a means of avoiding
any confusion that we might believe in any primary quality
to an object - anything that is not constituted by the web of
thought we apply to it. To live with this loss and believe art to
be an exception to the mundane (if we want to do that anyway)
requires an ongoing modifier, a type of magical thinking, a
black hole to evacuate doubt.
Form, when composed, even systemically, is unavoidable a
manifestation of an inner schematic. It is an assemblage of
"logics"' that are accumulated and archive through learning.
By learning I don't mean study or research, necessarily, but
impressions remembered, savored durations. They can be found
through play, in a misconstruction, in nature, in someone's
candor, in the way you leave your shoes that a house-mate
could recognize as somehow particular to your unconscious.
Forms are schematics of possible relations that constitute a
fragment of the infinitude of definitions for what a "whole" can
be. They are not media specific and are in no way an essence
of art any more than they are of essence to the markings on a
curb. They are the atomization of Bergson's duration and the
underlay of Piaget's Schema Theory and Boolean logic. They are
Meillassoux's "Figure."
Art's valuation of schematics is important to understand if we
believe that art should have a reciprocollay intertwining of
subject and object that goes beyond art objects"'and into life.
As inspiration for imagining form's potential differently, we'll
think through the work of Earle Brown.
133
"Logics" is an analytical term used by Anthony Braxton in
his deconstruction of music composition. See: Tri-Axium Writings and
Composition Notes published by Frog Peak, Hanover NH
Here I mean objects that are given a special status that grants
134
them the gaze to be "something other than they are" (Steven Connor,
2011)
Earle Brown
Two summers ago there was a workshop that was a long
imagined and planned for response to the question of how after
Earle's passing, his music could continue to be performed in
such a way that the spirit he brought to it during his life would
continue to be communicated.
A number of early and mid-career conductors from the USA
and Europe gathered in Frankfurt with Hans Zender as the
facilitator. Zender as has been mentioned, had worked with
Brown directly and conducted several extremely successful
performances of his work.
During one part of the workshop Zender made an observation
that had resonance with my own thoughts on Brown's practice,
and encircles the region of questions within which I would like
to share a few perspectives. I was excited to find this quote was
included in the video Susan showed at the Gardner, so you all
have heard it in Zender's voice, but once again in excerpt:
What Earle Brown said to us in his works is [that]
the work, in the modern sense of the word, is not
an identity. The identity of the work is our doing.
What we do. Sometimes I believe EarleBrown is a
sort ofprophet because he had, in his early works. .
. the situation of [contemporary] composers today,
after the post-modernism.
Brown would have been well understood by Buckminster
Fuller who said, in the context of a critique of overspecialization
in contemporary societies, recorded in the LP Fuller Thinks
Aloud"', that he liked artists because "they were trying to be
whole." Wholeness requires an embrace of multiplicity. At
the end of my first meeting with Brown to initiate a summer
study session in 2002, his more or less parting words were that
"being interested in music is not enough."
135
"R. Buckminster Fuller - R. Buckminster Fuller Thinks
Aloud (Part 1)," Discogs, accessed May 3, 2013, http://www.discogs.
com/R-Buckminster-Fuller-R-Buckminster-Fuller-Thinks-Aloud-Part- /
release/21 19493.
A productive way to consider Brown's legacy relating to
the Zender quote is to understand him as participating in a
multiplicity of historical continua in different fields, with his
point of contact being not only of his own time, but from a
variety of epochs and imaginaries. Partly, this multiplicity of
spark yielded a body of work and life whose significance as a
self-made constructive basis is beyond the tropes of influencing or
being-influenced. If we can, I propose we attempt to maintain
as much of his poly-dimensionality in thinking and supporting
what his work can offer for the future, and for right now. Its
my guess that it is the dimensionality that brings most of us
here today.
As for whether Brown was a modernist, a post-modernist, or
circumvented whatever mess of definitions we might find for
these words, his work does as Zender comments pose a deep
confound to nearly any box we might attempt to place his
practice within. Specifically I would say that his work avoided
the monolithic didacticism of much of modernism, though it
his work is precise, avoided the ambivalent relativity and ironic
juxtapositions of post-modernism, yet embraced a kind of
"everythingism."
Brown's work embraces multiplicity in ways we are only now
seeing in dance, and with only a few exceptions has existed
within the field of music. A point of reference that I would
draw your attention to is the work of Anthony Braxton, with
whom I think Brown's practice has perhaps more sympathy
than most.
What I will try to do is wander through this field of multiplicity
Brown has offered us, highlighting a few strands that deserve
more attention, and certainly more attention than I am giving
them in the next twelve and a half minutes. I want to emphasize
that by choosing points of focus, mainly the social dimensions
of his work, I'm not believing them to be primary, though I do
believe it to be essential and much overlooked for the surface of
his practice, the notation and language of his material.
**
133
Earle Brown "came of age" as a composer, whatever that really
means; perhaps, in Denver, Colorado. Prior to this it seems he
was much more a band leader, improviser, and a resourceaccumulating composition student. The "serious" composers
were involved with a variety of intense, perhaps rabid or at least
moon mad love affairs with serialist-typologies of thought.
This quantitative reality within musical material and formal
construction was a quite natural zone of entry for Brown to
become "a composer".
His background in both jazz-related
performance and improvisation, a highly permutative and
perhaps ultimately mathematical mode of music making,
engineering/math studies at Northeastern and with what he
called the "constructivist" approach of Schillinger techniques.
Via the biographies he wrote during his life, we know he first
encountered Schoenberg and Webern with Brogue-Henning in
the late 40s. We also know he was convinced of studying with
Schoenberg to the extent that he and Carolyn drove to his house
and sat in their car outside, but didn't knock. Schoenberg died,
and perhaps we're lucky that Earle was not more influenced by
Schoenberg than he was, though Earle kept a large photograph
of Schoenberg's head in his studio.
However, the operations within this area of practice emphasize
types of inventive thinking , more than imaginative thinking,
within a relatively small deviation from a quite clear paradigm,
even though the ideals of Adorno's modernism, which were not
adequately realized by his generation, would require something
far more Libertarian, which perhaps Earle realized most directly
in an odd way.
Earle would later refer to this type of paradigmatic mastery in
his writings as "craft" as opposed to whatever it was he felt
was doing (presumable making art). The last piece by Brown
that can be understood within the region of the paradigm I'm
describing is Perspectives for Piano, 1952, though aspects of his
musical material remain connected to it via his precompositional
planning and Schillinger methods. But I would propose that
we can consider this as a methodology for material coherence
within the larger experiment of his practice..
And here I'd like to make a few observations that color the rest
of what I'm going to discuss:
Music has never been one thing. Infact music has never
been a thing at all. But what is the location of the
"music" in Brown's practice?
In the current time, it may be that to strictly define Brown
as "composer" misdiagnoses his cultural production as
more "cloistered" than he ever thought of it, even though
is professional sphere and public self-identification
was as a composer.. Maybe artist-thinker? Or escaped
composer?
As we know from FOLIO, in this very beginning of Earle's
production, his compositions, and writings were much broader
in scope and in contradiction to the streams of composition
he has often been associated with historically and felt deeply
connected with at the time. Entries from his notebooks (kept in
a safe deposit box during his lifetime) contain ideas that likely
would have been unacceptable and far too-romantic for his
peers. I'm choosing one to riff on today: his explicit interest in
"magic" that supersedes his interest in quantification.
In 1952 he wrote:
I have always been drawn primarily to magic and
mathematics....in that order. To magic in the sense
that everything is and as it is it is magical - - - I don't understand it.... the impenetrable infinite
complexities and connections of all things. 136
And in 1955 he wrote about his prioritizing that which can not
be understood, joining art and life values directly:
I have always found that the most enlivening
thing about art, or anything else, was its mystery
and its being beyond my particular experiential
3
conditioning and therefore, understanding."
It is extremely unlikely that Brown was referencing stage magic,
136
137
Notebooks 1952-1955, Earle Brown Archive, Rye NY
Ibid
135
voodoo or spells, satanic divinations, or anything with these
types of cultural positions. The most likely usage would have
been magic as a duration, a moment or sequence of events
which unfold beyond what we can understand as within the
known schematics of possible experience. This makes magic a
place where such a feeling can be perceived as an activity in time.
In the context of music- and here I am not talking about
virtualized playback- which is an essentially social practice, it
is likely that the "magic" Brown is referring to in these notes
on music and art, is also something beyond the hermetic or
personal.
With FOLIO, Earle began to make work no longer as "music"
but as parametrized place. In this moment I would say he
"escaped".
In the Jan/Feb 1972 issue of Contemporary Music Newsletter
he writes a few notes about December 1952:
It is simply afield ofgraphic events which are to
visually suggest a kind of activity ...
Rather than a performed composition one hears a
composed performance 1'38
With this work, the Schillingerian , parametric approach leaves
its container within musical variables and becomes primarily
social. December 1952 is much more a statement on the social
situation for music making during that time than it is on the
purely "musical" dialectics of the period. The piece doesn't take
a position on notes and arguably no position on structure or
form in musical terms. He approaches these areas as byproducts
of a sociality put into motion with the gesture of offering a
page to willing recipients along with some instructions.
138
Brown, Earle, Contemporary Music Newsletter, 1972.
Referring here to Joseph Schillinger, the music theorist and
139
pedagogue whose methods Brown studied as his first formal music
training.
..........
0
Around the same time, Brown photographed himself in front
of a large sign that simply said "LISTEN" in all caps- we saw
this yesterday. This image was used in catalogs distributed
by Universal Edition for many years. Given what we know of
his personal history, he was surely confronting having left his
community of improvisers in Lunenburg and the Army Band
and was now contending with an entirely different and more
uptight breed of musical human.
With his highly developed, pointed but ambiguous image
making strategies , Brown re-figured musical reading, again
through a kind of bottom-up parameterizing that connected
the visual with the temporal, the aural, the kinetic. The
synergy of these result in a social construct. During the rest
of his career his strategies evolved, refined, and shifted until
the end of his life. Amidst the many composers who used
idiosyncratic representation in music, I think Brown's succeeds
because of his desire for strategies that were outcome-based
and quite pragmatically tested through his own experience as a
participant. This constellation of insertion points is one of the
main locations for his work concept, and from my perspective
perhaps the most expansive and lasting contribution he made.
Between 1956 (FOUR MORE) and 1995, Brown wrote only
one piece that could be performed solo, Nine Rare Bits for 1
or 2 harpsichords. And after 1961, with only a few exceptions,
all of his works required a conductor and whenever possible
Brown would have rehearsed and conducted these himself.
His work had become a process that addressed a constellation
of communications between author, representation, performer,
and audience and he was the facilitator. As he said in a televised
interview in the late 70s, he was looking for a "warmer"
way to engage with performers and felt that there would be
a transference of warmth from the community engaging the
activity as makers and the community receiving it. Perhaps here
we are talking about a kind of "Resonant Form" or even magic?
139
I'd like to now stop for a computational non-sequitur:
Rough approximation of the possible temporal displacements in
the first system of 25pages assuming a 20 second duration and
the possibility of a human to depress a key at a quantization
of 192, though our ears can differentiate time differences of a
millisecond which would mean ioo,ooo divisions per second.
There are more or less five rows of material. In the first 1/5,
the space is black, leaving 8oo possible attacks or releases.
The 2 divisions of a second, 1300, the 3 rd 200, the 4 th iooo,
the
5 th
2400. That's 5700 total. But we are reasonably good
at not depressing TOO far from the actual marking, let's give
ourselves a 5% deviation from "accurate", but my guess is that
in more complex sections it would be more - who knows but even at 5% that's 285. Now if we multiply this to the full
potential of our listening sense we'd be at about 142,500. This
is all assuming no influence of a conductor - but still - we
should understand that Brown most certainly was aware of
the standard deviations he was building into his notation - and
this is already quite a lot, though I've not done the research to
compare this to more standard formats.
mL
m
'k
__i4li
*
Earle Brown's
25
*
4
pages [Edition Peters]
F
f
In 1963 he wrote a letter to Benedict Pesle who was organizing
a magazine issue in Paris, below are notes for a text he may or
may not have finished:
Dec.'52 and Av.Fno.
Brief introductory notee to each as origB1II.
inally written.
Eopanosion of eacht- degrees of involvement of musicians
relative
to actual stetd
limitstions ind liberstiens.
Conservative to
extreme
Viol ability of concept or princiele.
Principle of
non-violability on the principle of havir" no rrinciple. ... only essenee
in danger of being existing or not existing....
a "danger" worth running..
.
for the
of (dec.'52) experiencing the failure and
degrees of
oxplaitation and sincerity aF thee intersect with eac other and with the
application.
ske
ori-inal conceptual e
(The essence contrinire
ence.
the
within itnelf
its
conditions of
own destruction by non-involvement of participrnto...life
the piece)
Conideration of the piece as a piece (object) or as an envir-
onnent (field of active involvement) Involvement as:- on its inherent
own terms (as object) or on unknown terms of participsata individual initiative.
Physcology of individurl
involvsment in
the
two different cases.
Relationship of the two different cases to ART idea, humren idea, musical
At what point in the process can control be exidea, sociological idea.
erted and in whrt manner, by whorl
If exEcred by eci,
wht romification
.rele.tive to piece as field of activity (lendscrpe of actit principle...
Danger of the
ivity), experimental sociologicel event, A2T, music, etc.
activity
in terms of destruction of intention or estrblishr.ent of orm....
..cliche, bon.litv, etc.
Banality as product of such octivitges relative
to controls and 5 of involvement relative to coefficients of control....z.
... rt
the
points nt which it may be imposed.
Banality as subject
they arise in relation and
of such activities
(the shades of banality a
varionu
in themselves.)
Pure benality ond pure uninueneso as intentions.
ducts or contrived objectives.
Difference between en object in
"By-pro-
the ART
activity
sense and a flexible conditional field of
in the "new" sense.
(an object hes an ideal.... a field of activity has on inherent conditional
existence within which
Identity
the ideal
is contained
but not trapped)
ntity
end
s crux of the situctisn. ... pure identity is impossible, as is
approechoble
pure entity... however, entity is the more
(by devious means)
...
the devious mens, depending upon their efficiencv, tend toward the
destruc tion of essential identity....which ie essenti l to the full existence of the org nisr".
'.org nis"nas a state necessary to the possibility
cf recognizing a 'thing' (as differentinted from rn exietant condition apa rt from conscious involven-ent)
the "value" of involving oneself
in a non-pre-existent involverent or 'thing'.
Av is there any interest
in "creating" nothing and aignin- ones nme to it?
(see nothing-sanething
article)....("no-thingrieso"
from Mlllarme to now..)
Confusion between that
objective and contemporary eyths of "nothingness" as phtlosophical demonstretions of "freedom".
((PRAIARY question of
being freed from the
participants or participants being freed frorm the work.))
(if
latter,
why
get involved in the first place.... there is no exterior necessity)
If theme
work
is an interior necessity why avoid it....
except out of fear %of failure to
realize the intention...,
defense neseure?
an 'solution'
a physcological
is masochietic to begin -ith)
If not, it
(this
approach
can only be a "re-
ligiouo" or morolistic impulse turned inside out.
Right oide out the appaoacn to this impulre would be more directly connected to 'skillful
means'
(shortest distnce
twn. etc.)
The roost skillful
means to the least releends is beside the point.
("if
there were n ooint this would be beside it")
If beside the point is the point iTitnes extremely skillful
means to mauintr in the 'no'
nositien.
If that i- not the
then it all
comes to the sare thing...everything is nossible, end there is no way to
meintnin that position.
feeding e way to r-int'
in tit rosition is to again
vant
noint
create the "'roblen'....
rid the circle
mgeazine (to
notes for orticle for 17.
Paris (contrescarp) April
'63(11th.)
begins
main
t no
artioular point.
Benedicte Fesle
58 Blvd. Montparnasse
(15)
And in 1964, in a document titled Process in Art he wrote:
This supposedly being a text on musiq must by necessity, speak
musical develon*ntu and historical possibilities and probabil
thereof.
It is, however,
one of the most relevant facts, that
time we have a unique (historically) situation in hand.. .name
(in our time) no one art can stand alone in regard to its rnti
concepts and 'sontent'.
It is obvious that ormnunioatfln (the
type of communication) is tremendously acellerated today....t
magazines, reviews, personal correspondence, etc. are availnbl
anyone (interestedi aye, there's the rub) within hours of
na.
gj.one take part in cultural (including science, pilos
etc.) activities anywhere in the world, almost as if It had hn
next door.
This may be a personal confusion but I feel that m
the ounl4Jg manifestation of a larger human concern which has
be cned
Art"... it is 2M aspect of this phenmenon, or hu
of the word,
cation (gi the information motivated kind of comuniantion).
individual arts cannot isolate themselves from one rnoter -nl
usion, uhich has to do wi th in the largest sense
141
As yet another brief cul-de-sac let's reconsider, for example,
Brown's interest in driving sports cars. Often we understand
men interested in fast cars as kind of phallic insecurity or status
symbol, but for Brown it is clear from his own descriptions and
Susan's that it was a combination of respecting the potential
beauty of a quantitative feat of engineering, such as is found
in the tuning of a Porsche, but also in the moments, perhaps
magical created by the possibilities the machine invents for the
skilled user and the dreamy quality of augmented locomotion
when taken to an extreme. Perhaps we can consider his work,
like Russolo's intonarumori, or Schillinger's early 20th century
mystic quantification optimism as possibility creating machines?
If Brown's work provide the mechanics for an activity toward
magic, where does that place him amidst the politics of the time
he inhabited. In a molding trunk I pulled from the basement
in 2005 that seemingly Earle had not sorted or perhaps even
opened since the early 70s, I found a letter from Luigi Nono to
Earle that was intensely critical of "the American composers"
who were standing by as their country fought in Vietnam. How
can we think about Brown's resonant form as political or not?
I would argue that Brown's work is located productively within
the social as much if not more directly than both Cage and
Rzewski, and in many ways shares more with Oliveros' exercise
or workshop approach. Brown was coming from a humanist
perspective that attempted to, for example, honor the training
and purpose of the musicians he worked with- the success of
his work in performance requires trust and vulnerability in an
immediate way between people. It was warmth dependent.
The kind of home-spunness of his paper indicators and the selfpublished scores - all of this was critical to the establishment
of the affective contagion that he had cultivated in himself and
was at least in part innate. His work was tremendously playful
and was as much about the joy involved with people working
together, communicating, moving toward, assembling, making
music in a simple way actually - sharing something special.
I've always had the sense with Earle's music, more than anyone
else's - and this is true EVEN when I am not sonically arrested
the performance - that it reveals the humanity of everyone
involved. The affective IS political and alienation, even if in the
service of a Utopian volition, has little evidence to base a claim
that it is a more successful political tool than enthusiasm and
togetherness- in fact its quite the opposite. And the social and
musical results are inextricable, Brown understood this deeply
and lived it.
And in relation to the previous texts, in particular those
relating to Meillassoux- we can take Hans Zender's quotation
even more specifically. The bypass of Postmodernism that
Brown constructs from the late 1950s is that of a view of
total contingency and the neccessity to accept the momentary
absolutes that can inform choice (as opposed to accepting
chance and a non-human force's intervention) and that to tune
one's perceptions in such a way that one can make a choice
that relates in some way to a perceived essence, however
temporary, is worth the risk. To repeat some of what he wrote
in 1962, seen above:
Violability of concept or principle
Principle of non-violibility
on the princple of
having no principle
Only essence in danger
... being or non-being
A "danger" worth running
143
15'0
R7'-2
3/4"
4 ol.
R7'-2 3/4"
R7'-2 3/4"
Schematics Toward Multiplicity
And in the same way, in some sense there is never
disorder,because disorder is just another order than
the one you expect. In your room, it may seem that
it is disordered when you work, but you know
where to find every book, every disk, and so on.
You know there is an order there. So it is difficult
to break with this formal possibility of order you can always make these objections. And you
cannot effectively show the disorder,pure disorder,
for these reasons,for these two reasons:firstly, the
duration of the experiment; and secondly, that,
formally, you can always say that a disorder is just
a more complicated order. The problem is just that,
as the painter has to show the transcendence, but
he can't show it, he can just make an analogon of
transcendence, with light, and so on. Well, I think
the best analogon is the world where you have this
continuity, and inside it you have this pure break, a
break that is too harshfor classicalprobability.And
this break can be a break of pure order - what I say
about hyperchaos, which is very important, is that
hyperchaos is a theory of time, a theory to show
that time is not becoming. Becoming is just a case
of time. Because hyperchaos is not just disorder, its
also the production of little static worlds - worlds
with absolutely no becoming, this too is a possibility
consistent with hyperchaos. That's why, when I
speak about hyperchaos, I say that chaos is a time
that can destroy everything, even becoming. This
is hyperchaos: you can destroy order, and you can
destroy becoming; and it you can also erect a perfect
classic order. What I call the n'importe quoi - the
anything - is not a disorder, it is not becoming."'
Q.Meillassoux/F. Hecker/R. Mackay. "Q Meillassoux/F.
Hecker/R. Mackay Conversation at Chez Meillassoux, Paris, 22.7..2010."
Urbanomic, July 22, 2010.
140
147
They who are acquaintedwith the present state of
the theory of Symbolic Algebra, are aware that the
validity of the processes of analysis does not depend
upon the interpretation of the symbols which
are employed, but solely upon the laws of their
combination. Every system of interpretation which
does not affect the truth of the relations supposed,
is equally admissible, and it is thus that the same
processes may, under one scheme of interpretation,
represent the solution of a question on the properties
of number, under another, that of a geometrical
problem, and under a third, that of a problem of
dynamics or optics. ... It is upon the foundation of
this generalprinciple,that I purpose to establish the
Calculus of Logic ...
' '
The lack of experimentalism applied to time-based forms since
minimalism has paralleled the emergence of the brain-sciences;
cognitive neuroscience in particular. These fields have become
a near-religious authority over how we relate and act on our
own subjectivity. We might consider the possibility that the field
has in fact been fed, and is fed, by our willingness to nourish it
with distended security as we seek a neuroscientific answer to
overwhelm our own speculative impressions of ourselves and
the things we perceive. This hearkens back to the earlier text
relating Meillassoux's concept of correlationism and the codicil
of modernity, which he identifies as the means through which
thinkers outside of science stay away from probing science's
claim.
Steven Pinker famously declared music as "auditory cheesecake,"
entirely dismissing any meaning or utility to the experiences
beyond pleasurable chemical discharges in constellation. This
was much to the chagrin of the musicology field, but largely
in line with where contemporary neuroscience's media image
is taking our self-understanding. More generous perspectives
on art's function have emerged from the field as well, but have
not been popularized; perhaps because art's marginalization
culturally and financially has no path to reconciliation with
research that would lead the public to start renting Xenakis
DVDs from Netflix. One study that I'll reference again later,
141
George Boole, The Mathematical Analysis of LogicBeing an
Essay Towards a Calculus of Deductive Reasoning, 2011, http://www.
gutenberg.org/ebooks/36884.
published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience'concludes
that art should be considered seriously by those studying
neuro-plasticity as there seem to be a number of long-term
changes from art experience that seem beneficial and operate
simultaneously within multiple areas of the brain at once. The
author further suggests that artists might consider the possibility
of making work that would focus on producing these kind of
changes.
The field of music cognition emerged in parallel to brain
sciences, coming into its own and taken seriously in the early
1980s. It arrived, fully inflated and smoothed by the popular
media within the last several years. Interstitial figures like Daniel
Levitan, the author of This is Your Brain on Music (2011) and the
ultimate media-neuroscientist Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia (2010)
have popularized via business class best-sellers, accounts of
what music has been and is for human beings. In both cases
they preface the text as in Sacks' with much: "we do not yet
know,""' when it comes to how much of our experience of
music is within "the music" and how much is within our brains.
In such texts the more subtle distinctions needed in philosophy
when asserting subject/object relations is not needed.
The field of music cognition is a bit of an odd case. While
there are neuroscientists studying film, there isn't a related
field designation populated by filmmakers, nor is there for
dance cognition field populated by dancers- a quick search
of journal articles in either case reveals the discourse is being
driven by neuroscientists interested in the activity, but not
necessarily having experienced the brain states they are seeking
to understand. While this may seem trivial, it is a confound to
Meillassoux's argument in After Finitude that science proceeds
without an eye to meaning if the scientists are following, even
if quietly, speculations that arise from their subjectivity (as in
Einstein's dreams that preceded his theory of relativity). Music
cognition is populated by scientists who often came from
a music background, or with at least some version of what
music is, sparking their curiosity. The terminology alone, the
142
Preminger, Son. "Transformative Art: Art as Means for Longterm Neurocognitive Change." Frontiersin Human Neuroscience 6 (April 24,
2012).
doi:I0- 3 3 8 9 /fnhum.2012.ooo
9 6.
Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales ofMusic and the Brain. Random
House Digital, Inc., 2010. xii
143
149
requirements of being conversant in music theory, all point to
a near-requirement of engagement with the field proper. The
literature points to an attempt to keep-in-check paradigmatic
discovery and pragmatic verifications, yet the most fundamental
areas of music as an integrated aural exercise are limited in the
most critical domain: time.
A Reckless History of Schemata
Marc Leman's research, since the early 90s has been exemplary
in his attempts to make headway in understanding the cognition
of musical structures with temporality intact.
His first book Music and Schema Theory [1995] attempts to
locate musical response within cognitive structuralism, which is
to say that meaning is produced by analyzing the similarity
and difference of objects in order to make a representation on
which perception is based. The result of differential process is
an analogical mental map (an isomorphism) that represents
the dynamics between the organization of the things perceived
internally, as closely as possible. This reflective "map" is a
schema or schemata. The origin of this idea is with argued and
claimed differently in different fields. For our purposes we'll
credit psychologist Jean Piaget (1928) whose ideas seeded
Bartlett (1932) - between the two, their notion of schema
has been the seed for many other theories under different
names, notably between 1975 and the present within Artificial
Intelligence, which in that field is named Frame Theory after
Marvin Minsky's coinage in 1975-
In order to return to Leman's path and the broader discussion
of why this trajectory is of interest, I'll sketch the history of
the idea. In the early 20th Century, Piaget developed a theory
for the cognitive development of children largely based around
the central principle of an evolving relationship to building and
recalling what he named schemas.
While schema theory is often credited to Bartlett (Remembering,
1932) in scientific fields, Piaget's text predates by four years,
but embeds the theory amidst the larger purpose of the text
Judgment and Reasoning of the Child.
A simple example of schema, just to make sure its clear what is
being talked about: you have only ever known cats to have long
hair. Your friends and family, everyone you know talks about
fluffy cats. You have also seen many colors, textures, sizes,
voices when encountering actual cats - and all of that is a part
of what "cat" is. Then at some point you encounter a cat with
no hair, you assimilate that information along with relational
information that places this new cat within the others, your
schema is transformed, and the image and lexical nature of cats
within your world has altered. Piaget's theory primarily deals
with schemas that are acquired and tested through verbalization,
but chooses to do so not because schemas are limited to
linguistic production and recall but because verbalization shows
the "schematism of the child's thought more clearly than in the
case with concrete ideas."'
Concrete is distinguished from the linguistic in a related
distinction as Pierre Schaefer's musique concrete, also in Paris,
beginning the late 1940s. For Schaefer, "concrete" also meant
what exists beyond the identification, recall, and explication via
language and toward what might be understood as a sound's
primary qualities. To this end, he worked on his Programme de
la Recherche Musicale (PROGREMU) which was an attempt to
define these qualities as a matrix of taxonomies. Were Schaefer
capable of representing this matrix mathematically, I believe he
would have chosen to do so, placing his practice in a position of
oscillation between the absolutism he has been historicized as
practicing (Kane 2007 and Kim-Cohen 2009) and a thinking
position - rather I would go further and say that it is clear
that he maintained a linguistic position vis a vis sound, and
utilized this position to attempt a quantification of sound's
primary qualities. Perhaps his error, which is a product of his
being so early in sound reproduction's ubiquity, was to locate
these qualities in "sound" rather than within a representation as
"audio." Piaget positioned himself as a "genetic epistimologist"
and we might consider doing the same for Schaefer, though
144
Ibid
151
Piaget was also expressly disdainful of phenomenology and
would otherwise be considered a structuralist.
The schema is proposed by Piaget as a reflexive mechanism to
understand children's cognitive development and demonstrates
that by asking questions of a child, one can reveal the
diagrammatic representations they've built of the world around
them. Children, according to Piaget have minimal deductive
power.'4 5 For Piaget this capacity is built by successful syntheses
between syncretic responses to arrivals of the given in the world
and juxtaposition. He views syncretism (the binding of things
together that are different) as formed by ego-centrism.4 6 The
ego-centrism of the child will seek to deform new experiences
to exist within schemas constructed by previous experiences.
This is his concept of assimilation and he views it as a means "
to create a fixed element, a uniform manner of reacting to the
flux of becoming."' 4 7 He describes it further: "To assimilate, in
psychology as in biology, is to reproduce oneself by means of
the external world ; it is to transform perceptions until they are
identical with one's own thought, i.e. with previous schemas."'4"
Assimilation in the framing above should be understood as
something akin to the defensive construction of a delusion. He
describes these as deforming assimilation and sees these cognitive
acts as irreversible: once the object and the schema have been
altered in this way [deformed], the mind cannot, after the act of
assimilation, turn back and dis-assimilate them, so to speak, so
as to find them identical with what they had been.'4 9
Deforming assimilations are a rejection of the world that is, in
favor the world we already know and feel OK about. What isn't
resolved in Piaget is how this is would be known- he is variously
interpreted and occupied an in-between position as to what
constituted the "concrete," not attempting a codification like
Schaefer. Nevertheless, his claim is that there is the possibility
to mis-categorize with one's subjectivity, which implies there
is something independent of it that constitutes the thing. His
Piaget, Jean.Judgmentand Reasoning in the Child. K. Paul, Trench,
Trubner &Co. ltd., 1928. 57
145
146
147
Ibid.
Ibid.
148
Ibid. 174
Ibid. 176
149
228
175
thesis was that these deforming assimilationswould inhibit a clear
link between one's inner world and the outer world, due to a
self-protection of the ego's centrality.'
The two other terms within schema theory that Piaget is identified
with are accommodation and equilibrium. Accommodation is
when we choose to construct a new schema or expand an
existing schema when confronted with something other to our
existing schemas. The latter is the desire for an equilibrius state
of being that drives a child to make sense of new experiences,
either by assimilating them when applicable or accommodating
them. Accommodation is achieved by mimesis - a mirroring
of the stimulus rather than rejecting and deforming it into
another, more known form. This model, a recursive dialectic
the requires ongoing exchange between our expectations,
desire, knowledge, and actions in the world is immediately
attractive as a way to understand time-based choices in
music. The metaphor can also be understood inverted, as the
composer/performer/thinker George Lewis articulates often,
here in 2009:
... our improvisations begin by analyzing our
situation and reading intention with the tools and
senses we have at hand, and in an expression of
recursivity, our development ofnew and more refined
analytic toolkits is fundamentally improvisative as
well. On the basis of our analyses, we actualize or
realize our desire, our intentions, our responses, in
a real-time analysis, generation, manipulation and
transformation of meaning, mediated by (among
other factors) the body, history, temporality, space,
memory, intention, material culture, and diverse
methodologies'
While Piaget was writing explicitly and exclusively about
children, his theories, and his subsequently defined "stages of
development" were utilized extensively in subsequent theories
of adult development and learning. Articulated with nuance
in each case, the architectonic dialogue of ego-centrism and
1'5
While Piaget is writing about children, I am using this
information to
151
1. George E. Lewis, "The Condition of Improvisation"
(presented at the Uncovering New Social Paradigms Within Spontaneous
Music Creativity, University of California at Santa Cruz, December 4,
2009), http://www.isimprov.org/writings/Lewis.UCSC.keynote.v3.pdf.
153
adaptation was critical to many theories up until humanist
psychology took over in the 196os and Piaget et al were
understood as insensitive and authoritarian, not acknowledging
the magic of childhood. Recently there has been a resurged
interest, and Schema Therapy (2003) and Cognitive Behavior
Therapy (late 197os, emerging from what was then called
"behavior modification) which focus on the correction of
"maladaptive" schemas, often from childhood, that are closely
linked with personality disorders. These two, systems-oriented,
therapeutic methods align historically with the revival of the
idea of schema in Artificial Intelligence.
The theory was revived in the 1970s in Marvin Minsky's
influential text A Framework for Representing Knowledge which
introduced his concept of "framing" which relied extensively
on schema theory and can be understood as the basis of his
thinking.5
2
Frame Theory relocates the concept to be understood aspatterns
and pulls away from the affect drive of Piaget (equilibrium).
The attraction for Minsky's in Al are obvious: schemata could
be understood as networks of variables whose interaction
could be quantifiable and engage with computational linguistics
model and natural language computing that had emerged,
emphasizing a grammar of grammars-type system with many
parallels to schema theory on its own.
The leveraging of psychological theory was critical to the
believability of AI, and schema theory has repeated been
appropriated by those understanding it as quantitative and
those understanding it as qualitative. In 1972 Minsky released
the Triadex MUSE which is widely described as a musical
instrument embedded with AI-properties, but is based around
an extensive library of patterns and possible modulations of
them, so while it is not an AI machine, it does afford a player
of the MUSE to explore and expand their schemata as relate to
musical sequences.
152
Brewer, William F., and Glenn V. Nakamura. The Nature and
Functions of Schemas. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1984.
Minsky has remained interested in music, and more recently it
has become clear that his reference points for "music" of his
interest are quite limited to highly conventional forms and why
they are broadly understood as effective. In 1981, the essay
Music, Mind, and Meaning is more open and he writes about
why human being's involve themselves with music at all, a
very different rationale and one that avoid neuroscience and
embraces the symbolic transference of abstract relationships
(as in the Boole quote above):
Why on earth should anyone want to learn
such things? Geometry is practical-for building
pyramids,for instance-but of what use is musical
knowledge? Here is one idea. Each child spends
endless days in curious ways; we call this play. A
child stacks and packs all kinds of blocks and boxes,
lines them up, and knocks them down. What is that
all about? Clearly, the child is learning about space!
But how on earth does one learn about time? Can
one time fit inside another? Can two of them go
side by side? In music, wefind out!'
He goes on to describe then, what knowledge a composer
would need to have when writing a piece of effective music:
... how can music paint its scenes unless composers
know exactly what the listeners will ask at every
moment?' 4
Minsky's position emphasizes a European intersubjective basis
for music, which should be understood not as a human lexicon
of schematic relations, but a culturally constructed basis for
understanding what aural continuities will cross the threshold
of "music" rather than be interpreted as a ghost, a mistake,
rehearsal, evidence of ethnicity, a machine, violence etc. The
notion that composition is a narration of expectation-in-time
assumes a shared lexicon of "frames" in Minsky's world, which
is decidedly not the case, in particular for younger generations
for whom access has not been the limiting factor in expanding
listening schema, exposure to forces that would imbue desire is,
perhaps the inverse of Minsky's generation.
153
Marvin Minsky, "Music, Mind, and Meaning," Computer Music
Journal 5, no. 3 (1981): 28-44.
Ibid.
154
155
--
- -,,,: ,: .......
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..........................
In 1979, Alinda Friedman published one of the few studies of
that era that was to explore the extent to which Frame Theory
(called-so now after Minsky) could assist in understanding
how people apprehend information from images. Her study
concluded that her adult subjects were focusing their attention
on the part of an image requiring accommodation and ignoring
the parts that were assimilated and concludes that "the episodic
information ...remembered ...is the difference between that
event and its prototypical frame representation in memory"'
If relocated in dialogue with Minsky's perspective we could
see Friedman's difference between as the threshold where an
expectation is met or upset. Taking this, we could think about
tension and release, for example, and imagine that perhaps
more attention is being paid to the unexpected. It would
been interesting for Friedman to have slowly modulated the
"interruption" to be the constant, which would have proposed
some mechanics for how difference and sameness thresholds
relate to each other.
The appropriation of schema theory into Al's trajectory released
a backlash from some psychological circles who felt the theory
had been dehumanized, also a critique of Al proper. Piaget was
in large part discussing affect, motivations, and means referred
to as "hot" qualities, while much of the work utilizing the idea
of schema, ignored these aspects in their research and applied it
only to "cold" aspects of behavior. An impassioned call to bring
back the "hot" came from the field of communications, where
marketing professionals and news agencies were beginning
to shape their messaging by analyzed it using computational
linguistics models , 6
So now back to Marc Leman, who in the mid-9os was pursuing
a model of music cognition via this legacy of schemata. His
1995 text attempts a theory of pitch within this framework and
was received with enough acclaim that two years later he edited
Friedman, Alinda. "Framing Pictures: The Role of Knowledge
in Automatized Encoding and Memory for Gist."Journalof Experimental
Psychology: General io8, no. 3 (1979): 316-355. 343
Deetz, Stanley A. Communication Yearbook 15. Routledge, 12010.
156
46 54
-1
Gina Garramone, A Broader and Warmer Approach to Schema Theory, p
155
157
the hefty Springer publication Music, Gestalt, and Computing.In
searching for further developments in his research it became
clear that he developed software up until 1999 that was
working toward a model of machine learning that would "decompose" music and allow it to be classified. 7
In an email to the author answering why he had abandoned
schema as his working model, he expressed that his team had
found no way to instruct a computer to decompose music's
time-based structures using a schema-like conception.'
For Leman, in the context of his field an acceptable theoretical
position requires a quantitative model that is a demonstration
of the theory as well as a mode of experimentation to test it.
There seem not to be others working with schema theory in
the way Leman was during the late 1990s.
To get around Meillassoux's assessment of science as defining
subjectivity without a responsibility to considering meaning,
a field like music cognition could opt to embrace a model
whereby quantification can be a latter stage of production and
that speculation for certain types of unanswered questions is
afforded some status while quantifiable models unfold. Exiling
what can not be quantified right now by scientific measure, in
parallel with science's authority over the subjective constructs
a panopticon wherein thoughts, never mind actual research must
acquiesce to an existing mode of quantification rather than
discovering the means of measure in pursuit.
Leman's latest research and the research of the Institute for
Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music in Ghent has embraces
the paradigm for cognition of entrainment, which proposes
that the interrelation between the mind and the body happens
through mirroring (similar to Piagetian accommodation) but
is imagined as decidedly more physical than schema theory
157
Carreras, Francesco, Marc Leman, and Micheline Lesaffre.
"Automatic Harmonic Description of Musical Signals Using Schemabased Chord Decomposition."Journalof New Music Research 28, no. 4
(December 1, 1999): 310-333. doi:iO.1o 7 6/o 9 29 -821 5 (19 9 1 2 ) 8:0 ;19
2
4
O;FT 3 Io.
158
27, 2013.
Marc Leman, "Re: Disappearance of Schema Theory," March
explicitly provides a basis for. In has latest research he is locating
the initial responses to music in gesture and physical sympathies
that then loop between- "action-perception coupling systems"
that do reference a lexicon (he calls it a "repertoire") of previous
action-perceptions that are compared. The diagram of his
"coupling system" is nearly identical to those found within the
technique of Case-Based Reasoning, another AI-era computer
learning model.
On a macro-scale Leman's current model is almost identical to
his previous. Still the listener is imagined to have a corpus of
learned structures, a schema or an action-repertoire, still there
is a moment of differentiation or analysis, and the flows between
these lead to expansions of the repertoire or not. The shift
seems pragmatic - seventeen years after his original publication,
neuroscience has not provided adequate measurements for
complex phenomena like music that include temporality, an
absolute necessity. Minsky's perspective is that through music
we find out about time - its how we play with it.
Even without that more philosophical position, we know that
music constructs episodes and has a layered, ornate timing
structure within. To disqualify the time domain would place
the results of cognitive research in this time in limbo, no?
The just-released compendium The Power of Music of which
Leman is an editor, has one essay documenting his recent
research. He admits that his "action-repertoire" is still
a-temporal, due to a lack of knowledge available:
The power of music is strongly dependent on the
experiences that people accumulate during previous
interactions with music. However, it is not yet
clear how structural issues of music (e.g related to
harmonic,tonal, rhythmic and timing schemata) are
actually related to a repertoireof actions."9
Leman, Marc. "Fundamentals of Embodied Music Cognition."
159
In The Power of Music, 2012. 33
159
For someone as dedicated to digging into the question of time,
and who already abandoned one theory for an unsatisfying
resolution, this must be extraordinarily frustrating. Given his
position in the field, we have to assume that it is not for lack of
awareness that he comes to the conclusion above. If we believe
him, that science can not provide him with the tools he need to
proceed without a disclaimer similar to a sculpture being only
described as a surface, how should we think about the state of
the field? If the time domain is as under-theorized, how can we
understand the research produced to be more than an archefossil - something else to believe - rather productive, meaningful
food for informing our experience within empirical bounds?
Music cognition's first and still most visible journal, Music
Perception began publishing in 1984. Since that time the field's
focus has transformed via new tools afforded by the brainsciences, and also the leaving-behind of areas where some
paradigmatic agreement arrive, as in pitch perception and scene
analysis. There was a self-study published at Music Perception in
2009 that performed a statistical analysis across all papers that
use empirical methodologies. The results reveal that it is only
the last decade that temporal perception and affect move to
comprising a combined -6o% of articles published from their
starting point at a combined io%. In 1984 the top categories
were melody, pitch, and performance.1o
The conditions of the experiments were also approached on the
basis of their location and technology of stimulus production.
Experiments were performed on: headphones (44%), external
loudspeakers (25%), sound booths (23%) and with the use
of amplifiers (18%). This categorization is confusion as two
are diffusers of sound, one is a type of enclosure, and another
doesn't move any air and is solely an electrical circuit.
Areas with almost no coverage, such that they don't figure into
the analysis are the relationship between location and meaning
160
Anna K. Tirovolas and Daniel J. Levitin, "Music Perception and
Cognition Research from 1983 to 20o: A Categorical and Bibliometric
Analysis of Empirical Articles in Music Perception," Music Perception: An
Interdisciplinary Journal 29, no. i (September 2011): 23-36
(spatialization), nor any research pursuing the more esoteric
claims of post-concr6te audio work upon which so much has
been written in the field of sound studies."
For this project- both within and beyond these texts -the most
critical miss is that there is no research on the extra-musical
meaning of time-based structures, which has long been a
subject of speculation amongst composers and theorists, and
has implications for how audio are functioning as they transport
durational trans-substance into the present.
161
See: Kim-Cohen (2009) and Sterne
161
(2003)
A BLACK
HOLE THAT
CONSUMES
ALL DOUBT
Post-Script Speakeasy
A Diatribe Softly Spoken
We survived the Bush i, Clinton, and Bush 2 eras on a diet of
disassociation. We lived through the dot.com bubble and we
or our friends were paid high wages as teenagers to design
websites for a generation who didn't have a sense of algorithm
or the Internet future. We all saw it coming, we witnessed
it with optimisms and observed its disappointing turn from
Utopian space of possiblity to marketplace. But even we didn't
realize that apps were just wrappers for websites. In our lives
what isn't a browser, an operating system, a desktop?
We were the first generation to grow up with mobile
recordings- the Walkman Generation who experienced the
total consolidation of the airwaves in the late-gos. We heard
the same handful of songs on the schoolbus every morning,
in different orders, seveal months at a time. We noticed. "12
CDs for a Penny,,I62 Milli Vannili pioneered and was castigated
for lip syncing our childhood joy. In slightly less authorially
complex scenarios we watched this become common practice,
with figures as squeeky clean as Yo-Yo Ma at Presidential
Inaugurations.'3 The desired authenticity of voice would morph
into an auto-tune addiction, a technologized voice, and a global
craze for karaoke-projected identity into media heroism. But in
all this, our voice disappeared or became untranslatable. The
voice ever increasingly accepted as representation or projection
against in a glass house; nothing more has seemed possible.
We witnessed waves of "alternative" musics become cash cows
for an ever global culture industry. We watched as our youth
experience was nostalgized and resold to us by our enterprising
peers a decade later. Global hipsterdom was exported, Brooklyn
as identity-space in particular was a stock invested in by the
identity industry on an unprecedented global scale. In 2013
The membership sales line for the Columbia House Music Club
162
during the 1990s
1. Yo-Yo Ma On Recorded Music At Inauguration: NPR,"
163
NPR.org, accessed May 9, 2013, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
story.php?storyId=99816993-
165
every metropolis contains 20-somethings listening to almost
the same music, invoking the same fashion-identity cues as if
straight from the mouth of VICE Magazine.
The same emerged for global business centers as men and
women de-subjectified themselves from geography and
history to align with expectations defined by the international
marketplace
for middle-men. The art markets ballooned,
reality TV was re-invented, YouTube arrived as the site of
revolutionary content and simultaneously the propeller of
popularity-driven "crowdsourced" content - entertainment
"gone viral". Friendster, Myspace, Facebook - the last a total
consolidation a data mine containing the public by their own
desire for wandering social contact. Kids would rather text than
talk - and wonder if someday they will learn how to have a
conversation, accepting the lack of control, a moment where
one's self ceases to be an easily crafted representation of social
desire.
The Internet became window shopping, identity consumption,
and basic decision of separation and choosing became curating;
now, everyone is a curator of something, primarily themselves;
our precious arrays of preferences professionalized. We just
can't stop producing our self.
We totalized our lives with the notion of design; a euphemism
for the culture industry's hold on our attention. Make it smooth,
make it pop, "get it done."' 64
Digital fabrication began filling our pockets and homes with
devices and cars that became blobs. Remember "gun metal" in
the early 2000s was so hot. Architecture became blobs or Rhinoporn. 6 , we didn't realize how fetishized these tools we never
saw were. Designers became celebrities, celebrities became
designers, the public consumed themselves and serialized life as
a transition between designed space- every moment handled by
a designer's desire for beauty (?), not commerce?
164
See (Callahan 2013) for a further exploration of this phrase's
cultural position and origin.
165
Rhino is a software tool with an extension called Grasshopper
that affords with ease the creation of algorithmic forms not dissimilar
from software developed for sound synthesis.
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Entire countries nearly ceased to produce goods and would
discuss with disbelief that (gasp) non-Europeans would be as
smart and capable of developing the skill sets to overwhelm the
entitled American and European states.
Thomas Friedman declared the "world is flat" again imagining
equal access to all building blocks of production via computers
and the Internet. He declared that Americans would be the
designers and the rest of the world would worry about making
it for us. Richard Florida told us that we were, perhaps, The
Creative Class and we began to hear ourselves referenced
as "creatives". Endless how-to books on creativity became
Business Class best sellers with titles like Steal Like and Artist;
post-modernism simplified via Ecclesiastes.' 66
We know all about genre, genre-bending, post-genre,
interdisciplinarity, "low walls" between, intermedia, rhizomatic
media, emergent structures, post-disciplinary, art and
technology, art and science, high brow, low brow (and Foster's
"nobrow"), world music, world fusion, jazz fusion, at least
twenty sub-genres of "electronic music", metal, hip hop, and
forgot mostly about dance and theater.
Our attention has followed these attempts to unify as brand
and we track the developments unavoidably. We reject a lot
consciously, we believe we have kept our distance until we look
around and realize everyone has purchased the same telephone
and identifies with it, defends it as if an abusive partner. We talk
about it, we have rhetoric, we rationalize our participation in
the design economy and struggle to hear our desire unfulfilled.
Design lust, a thirst for specificity applied to our consumptive
approach, our taste, it is our generation's asphyxiant inheritance.
The information landscape has been densest for our generation
and for the most part we have fed it, even aware of its
contradictions. How many profiles do you have? Do you season
them to suit the context? To quote my nephew at 4, looking
at himself on Skype "How did Jesse get IN there??!". It has
166
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative,
FirstEdition (Workman Publishing Company, 2012).
seemed a gravity impossible to resist for fear of increasing the
alienation we already felt. Social media has privileged the desubjectified entrepreneur in all categories. We can use GRINDR
and have sex with strangers by GPS, or seek love on OK Cupid,
and then go back to cat photos on Facebook. We've been told
these are our generation's revolutionary tools- especialy over
there - but we saw war protests and Occupy re-enact the failed
models of "activism" we dreamed of as teenagers watching
Woodstock or punk documentaries on public television.
We don't know who "the man" is anymore but we do know
that Diebold is programming our democracy with their voting
machines. We sign. We complain. We disassaciate and check
Facebook. We think about work. We're told there are no jobs,
but who wants a job?! Do we know what we want and from
whom? From what? We act as if we have the syringe, but what
good is a syringe if we can't find a vein that heads back to the
heart?
Don't forget about designer babies and how everything we've
been diagnosed and medicated for will be erradicated for our
children by science? Will it? Has it? How much will it cost? We
just know Derrida took speed till the end and people should be
happy- take a pill -we don't need a world that works for us,
we need to take pill so we can work in the economy without
misery.
We have grown up the children of hippies and moved to the
city - around the world. We've been mobile. We've been vegan,
carnivorous, gluten-free, alcoholics. We grew up smoking pot
or taking ecstasy - living fast or slow, became lawyer-cokeheads or our friends - heroin a borderline crossed only by those
seeking to love death.
We caught the end of rave culture, but were told it died before
we got there. We were too young for the Grateful Dead - some
people had Phish for a few years. Tribalism seemed optimistic in
the 9os. It supported an alternative economy, and occasionally
a break from the police state we felt as teenagers.
169
Apple. Google. Teenagers meeting with Venture Capital.
Teenagers inventing the sociality, the economy, count,
correlate, creativity-as-capital, CEOs reading about how to be
artists, artists reading about how to be CEOs. Don't understand
and you might find yourselves stockpiling canned goods or
weapons or camping out in front of a bank. Correlate. Iterate.
Make a demo.
The flow of design capital in the name of leveraging identity
away from our inner lives and into consumption isn't the topic
of this essay. Its the surface noise of a record I am proposing
we make- that we continue to develop - and I hope to bypass
the ambivalence we've felt. The guilt we learned at expensive
palaces of liberal arts education whose debt we still carry.
I have tried write about art and music and what can be put at
stake if we want to take back our attention from the isolation of
art from reason (imagination). What we've forgotten about the
most radical fronts of 6os action is belief. What can we believe
in? Local food? Bicycles? The Perfect Shot (of Espresso)?
Special Yoga Equipment? This quaintism will not save the
planet, nor the flexibility of our minds to be aware of true
alternatives by which I mean that which is not in response to
or negating, but a possibility left unaccounted for. We have
to believe again that elevating awareness, that learning in the
broadest sense is central to this, and to reject forces that pull
us away from this personal expansion and its social radiation.
If our generation is to have any revolutionary potential within
our own lives, never mind the lockstep of the culture, we must
commit to an escape into multiplicity.
This is my diatribe - giving a loudness to what is often the
smallest voice in the multitude we hear as thought.
N
.4-ss.
.4:
173
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Index to Diagrams
All diagrams by the author, listed below in order of appearance.
Further information can be found online at nophones.org.
Sublime Desire
Burdock Systems
Correlationist's Mess (Tokyo)
Case-Based Reasoning
Amacher Constellation Crop S.P. Biennial 2012
Aeroponic Growing Apparatus And Photosynthesizer
Text Score For How To Know You Are In A Room With No Walls (OnAn
Exchange Between Alan Kaprow And Robert Smithson)
Psychoanalytic Relationship By Way Of Lacan
Burdock Systems
Burdock Systems
Formal Analysis Of How To Know You Are In A Room With No Walls
Rendering For Perfume Bottle Containgin Real And Permanent
Good, MIT Media Lab Essence
The Desubjectified Artist Cracks Open A Coconut
Flow Diagram For The Composition Software Designed For The Phoenix
Burdock Systems
Correlationist's Mess (Tokyo)
My Text For How To Know You Are In A Room With No Walls
Burdock Systems
Text Score For How To Know You Are In A Room With No Walls (On An
Exchange Between Alan Kaprow And Robert Smithson)
Correlationist's Mess (Tokyo)
Burdock Systems - Reading Room Architectural Drawings
Concert Program, Senior Project - Wesleyan University December 2002
Correlation In The Production Of Site-Specific Public Art
Burdock Systems
Correlationist Mess (Tokyo)
Burdock Systems
Burdock Systems - Reading Room Architecutral Drawings
Spectra
A Black Hole That Consumes All Doubt
Burdock Systems
Correslationist's Mess (Tokyo)
For Harry Berkovitz and His Air
p,~K
)
A
4,