When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived in my work, taking the place of the linear counterpoint. When these sound-masses collide, the phenomena of penetration and repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows. … In these moving masses you would be conscious of their transmutations when they pass over different layers, when they penetrate certain opacities, or are dilated in certain rarefactions.
Varèse and Wen-chung 1966: 11–12
To regard “form as a point of departure, a pattern to be followed, a mold to be filled” (16)—as being, as object—would be a mistake. Referring to Busoni, Varèse postulates, “Form is a result—the result of a process” (ibid.), a process of an impersonal becoming, that is rather comparable to the formation of crystals than to any kind of “subjective intuition.” Also John Cage, Morton Feldman, the Minimalists, etc., committed themselves to the musical exploration of the virtual and processual field of music, to the liberation from human subjectivity towards a realm of the experience of sound itself (cf. also Cox 2003).
As mediated by John Cage, a better part of the American musical avant-garde refers to the philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who conducted sound experiments at Walden Pond in the mid-nineteenth century.
In 1851, Thoreau notes an acoustic experience in his journals that reveals his particular sensibility to his sonic environment: “Yesterday and to-day the stronger winds of autumn have begun to blow, and the telegraph harp has sounded loudly … the tone varying with the tension of different parts of the wire. The sound proceeds from near the posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid” (1962, III: 11). Far from being an isolated case, Thoreau focuses on the “sound of nature”—and in particular the “sound of the weather”—in various other entries in his journals: “Nature makes no noise. The howling storm, the rustling leaf, the pattering rain are no disturbance, there is an essential and unexplored harmony in them” (1962, I: 12). Thoreau is exploring the audible world like a sound-archaeologist, carefully distinguishing “sound” from “music:”2 To fellow-Transcendentalist Emerson, mind, not matter, is of prime importance—matter is only a manifestation of the mind. Thoreau, in contrast, stresses the material and sensual aspects of nature—“We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life … Is not Nature … that of which she is commonly taken to be a symbol merely?” (1998: 307). Thoreau does not read nature like, does not interpret nature according to a spiritual principle external to it—such a principle, because of nature’s manifoldness, is immanent to it. For Thoreau, nature’s “music” is “the sound of circulation in nature’s veins” (1962, I: 251). It is in this stress on nature as sensuous experience and materiality that Thoreau “deviates” from Emerson. Thoreau focuses on [the music of] nature as a material, physical process, not as an Emersonian emblem of reason—“The very globe continually transcends and translates itself. … The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth” (1973: 306–7). “Transcendentalism” is understood by Thoreau completely “physical”—the natural, dynamic process of metamorphosis, of continuous change—transcendence becomes immanence.
In his journals, Thoreau writes: “Now I see the beauty and full meaning of that word ‘sound.’ Nature always possesses a certain sonorousness, as in the hum of insects, the booming of ice … which indicates her sound state.” The pun on “sound” as acoustic sound and “sound” as a state of health even calls for a reference to Thoreau’s dictum “in wildness is the preservation of the world” (from his essay “Walking”). Here “wildness” refers to the untamed but also to anything that resists representation and any static thinking of identity: the continuous self-differentiation of the world, its growing, its dynamics, its processuality—here lies its “soundness” and also the “essence” of sound. Thus “sound thinking” does not only imply “the thinking of sound,” but also “healthy thinking,” or, as Deleuze puts it: a thinking that rightfully earns its name: a thinking that does not derive its parameters|concepts from an exterior “verified knowledge” (Deleuze calls this “recognition”) in order to adapt the object of investigation to these parameters, but rather a thinking that develops its very concepts from the examination of the object of investigation (Deleuze calls this “encounter”): here—a thinking with and by means of sound, not a thinking about sound, which eventually does not deal with the question what music is, but rather what music can become. And from this vantage point research and art, theory and practice, are coextensive.
The following essays explore this realm of sound thinking—essays by scholars and philosophers, interspersed with “sonic thoughts” from a more artistic/practitioners’ direction.
Krien Clevis—Time|Place|Memory: Artistic Research as a Form of Thinking-Through-Media
Art can be motivated by the desire to map current social issues or concerns addressed within a particular discourse (without actively participating in it), while art may also be used to initiate discussion through the media it produces. Moreover, through its way of showing things, art establishes a connection with its audience. In this context Krien Clevis describes the role of art within such discourses as mediation, whereby art does not merely serve as a vehicle for ideas or concerns; art also serves to constitute, displace, recreate, change, or translate them. From this perspective, as well as on the basis of the artist’s autonomous mode of thinking, art may in fact reveal different or alternative scientific perspectives and reflect them back on its audience, users, clients, etc. In their research, artists capitalize on the synergy between their own artistic practice, the various relevant research concerns, and the unique interactions involved—while also pursuing reflection on these aspects. This is where artistic research comes in. Clevis’s contribution is one of a non-musician. As a visual artist and researcher, with a PhD in the arts, she specializes in images and their meaning when researching a specific place. Looking back on her dissertation project, she shares her views on the meaning of artistic research. Starting with her visual work, she begins with the end in order to end with a beginning, or with some rather particular indefinite end, if such exists at all. Artistic research goes further than that. Before discussing the role of artistic and historical “sightlines” in her work, she briefly lingers on its autobiographical sightline.
Lasse-Marc Riek—Walking into Sound (sonic thought i)
Lasse-Marc Riek’s essay is an auditive work about natural and mediatized listening in the landscape. In the spring of 2010 he started to trace the landscape with his ears and his entire body to develop a grasp for sound through his own experience. For three days he hiked and listened for 40 kilometers through the hilly landscape along Rio Paiva in Portugal, with limited food supplies, sparse equipment, and growing ears. He wrote about succinct, unspectactular, rare, and familiar sounds. This is how this readable listening-diary came into being.
Sabine Breitsameter—Soundscape as a System and an Auditory Gestalt
Based on an enigmatic quote by German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), Sabine Breitsameter’s paper frames both intellectually and aesthetically the conceptual substructure of the term soundscape, as coined and published by the Canadian pedagogue, sound researcher and composer R. Murray Schafer. Relating the term soundscape to Gombrich, Heidegger, McLuhan, and Weizenbaum, it emerges as a figure of thought, a mindset, allowing a certain intellectual approach, and an auditory Gestalt, allowing to perceive and listen in a special, maybe new way. By this, the term’s deeper dimensions are carved out, thus expanding its scope from a “green” environmental approach to an existential way of being and an inevitable pre-requisite of s
ound thinking.
Angus Carlyle—Memories of Memories of Memories of Memories: Remembering and Recording on The Silent Mountain
This essay found its catalyst in the Picentini mountain range, in the hinterland behind Naples and Salerno. Angus Carlyle had been invited to a residency program by the arts organization Fondazione Aurelio Petroni and contributed to an exhibition there entitled Viso Come Territorio (The Face As Territory). Traveling to southern Italy and returning home over a period of five months sharpened previous experiences of field recording, particularly in terms of the complex relations between that sound arts strategy and the operations of memory. Carlyle proposes an approach that is inspired by addressing the acoustical functions of sound as themselves “memorial”—in the sense that sounds remember their origins in a prior release of mechanical energy and recall the propagation path through which they have traveled. From that initial impetus, he goes on to consider recording technologies and techniques as active participants in the character of sound rather than the transparent, blank forms of registration they might otherwise be assumed to be. He attempts to open up the practice of field recording to processes of listening, remembering and composing which are not staged in linear, chronological fashion, but which fold back in on each other in iterative cycles. The cyclical nature of these processes suggests the need to reconfigure our definition of the field as a discrete, distant territory; instead, field and home might be connected in a shifting, partial, and contingent morphology. The essay is populated by short first-person texts. These texts perform two tasks: they engage with Wittgenstein’s fragment on memory from Zettel and adapt his formula to think through memory-sound, memory-words, and recordings; and they are mechanisms through which the “remainder” might intrude (a remainder that is made up of everything from the field that the recorder cannot capture). Carlyle finishes by projecting an account of two dimensions in field recording practice: the first internal, connected to the solitary listening and remembering recordist; the second, external, opening out to those others who share the expanded field of environmental sound.
Thomas Köner—Thaumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and Non-Thinking (sonic thought ii)
In his “Thaumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and Non-Thinking” composer and audiovisual artist Thomas Köner explains a practice of artistic creation that is based on the tension of place (topos) against the variety of resonances that arise around it. He understands composition as a continuum, where a score can be understood as map that charts degrees of vibrational awareness.
Heiner Goebbels—The Sounds of Things (sonic thought iii)
In his essay Heiner Goebbels rethinks the meaning of “The Sound of Things” in his compositions and theater works of the last thirty-five years. From manipulated bell sounds in his first tape compositions, the rhythmic repetition of breaking windows in a sound collage, the looped sound of high heels walking on a Boston sideway, to the inspiration drawn from the sound of a writing hand or an espresso pot, Goebbels describes how things and their sounds have conquered more and more space in his works. They impose their own rhythms and dynamics; their presence influences words, movements, actions; they call for respect and in the most intriguing moments they break the logic and the sovereignty of the human performers. By letting the things and their sounds become more than just illustrations, but rather protagonists, Goebbels turns traditional hierarchies upside down and ultimately avoids an anthropomorphic center and identification.
Christoph Cox—Sonic Thought
What would it mean to think sonically rather than merely to think about sound? How can sound alter or inflect philosophy? What concepts and forms of thought can sound itself generate? These are the questions Christoph Cox addresses in this essay. His aim is to track some of the ways that philosophy has or could be inflected by sound in order to produce not a philosophy of sound or music but a sonic philosophy. Sonic philosophy begins not from music as a set of cultural objects but from the deeper experience of sound as flux, event, and effect.
Bernd Herzogenrath—in|human rhythms
In many ways, the twentieth century can be regarded as art’s attempts to escape the “tyranny of meter” (the phrase is Robert Schumann’s). In his essay, Bernd Herzogenrath asks the question if there is a way to think rhythm otherwise? Maybe the answer to this all-too-human tyranny of the repetition of the same is something inhuman—in|human rhythms. With the examples of works by John Luther Adams, David Dunn, and Richard Reed Parry, this essay tries to show how with the idea of the human becoming a geological (i.e., non-human) force itself, art has the responsibility to create an awareness of how we live not only in the world, but also as part of that world. A music that “performs” these “cosmic dimensions” of the interdependence of human and non-human, by focusing on the in|human of the concept “human” might also teach us something in regard to artistic (or musical) form—these rhythmic “relations of velocity” ultimately reveal rhythm as the in|human nonlinear pulsation of “a life.”
Jessie Beyer and Jason Wallin—Sound Without Organs: Inhuman Refrains and the Speculative Potential of a Cosmos-Without-Us
For its modelization in grade school textbooks, enhanced telescopic imaging via Hubble, and through Hollywood science fiction settings, the cosmos has passed into recognizability. Such familiarity might be said to occur by dint of what Thacker (2011) refers to as anthropic subversion, or rather, the territorialization of reality from a distinctly human-centric point of view. Where the drives of modernism aspire to the Earth’s refashioning “for-us,” this essay aims to consider the ways in which anthropic subversion now extends beyond the “blue ruin” that is modernism’s horrific outcome. From the generalized re-imaging of space as the new frontier for mining, to the anticipated colonization of Mars, the alien abyss of space becomes submitted to the will of human life. Yet for the various ways in which the cosmos has been habituated to human sensibilities and rendered as a backdrop to our aesthetic preferences and desires, this essay speculates on a series of electromagnetic recordings of cosmic objects obtained by the probes Rosetta and Voyager that invert or subtract a particular teleology linked to anthropocentric thought.
Deep space interactions of electromagnetic particles, solar winds, and planetary magnetosphere received by NASA probes Voyager, INJUN 1, ISEE 1, and HAWKEYE have been translated to reveal a diversity of inhuman soundscapes.
It is along this trajectory that Wallin and Beyer borrow from Murphy and Smith’s (2001) Deleuzian inflected provocation “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” for speculative ends. That is, by rejoining thought to such alien compositions as that of Comet 67P, we might become capable of relaunching sound along strange non-philosophical vectors in support of both new problems and horizons for thought.
Christoph Lischka—Buzzing off … Toward Sonic Thinking
For quite some time now there is growing evidence both in the so-called Cultural Studies as well as in the Sciences that the existing positivist conceptual frameworks fail in particular areas—they turn out as inadequate or even incoherent with respect to the existing empirical data. A prominent example in the Sciences is Quantum Gravity where heavily established concepts like “space” and “time,” “objectivity,” “determinism,” etc., are put into question; and for many researchers in the “Cultural Studies” it feels strange to discuss topics as “affect,” “emotions,” or “sound” and “voice” under a semiotic regime.
In his essay Christoph Lischka focuses on the concept of Sonic Thinking, and will try to understand how existing ontological narratives eventually turn out to be inappropriate for an adequate investigation of sonic experience. As an alternative, he outlines a research strategy oriented at a process-based narrative, drawing on endeavors in fields as diverse as mathematics, logic, computer science, quantum gravity, and philosophy. Eventually he reaches a point of convergence where we get the conceptual apparatus to construct an “ontology” suitably not to think on sound, but rather to think sound—Sonic Thinking.
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Jakob Ullmann—Sound Beyond Nature/Sound Beyond Culture, or: Why is the Prague Golem Mute?
Jakob Ullmann’s essay asks—in a more philosophical sense—about the nature of sound on the background of a situation where listeners cannot escape sound and sounds. On the one hand sound is used—in present as in past—for the good and for the evil, sound has in this respect no protection against (mis-)use. On the other hand sound, especially because it does not represent anything except itself, cannot become domesticated without a rest of chaotic, of strange, wild, even awful primordial powers. The combination with the Greek LOGOS is one (a partial) answer to the question. It is combined with mythological knowledge, a message of nowhere, but a message from time in which the order of the world was not yet disturbed by the order of man. The early Christians decided to reject “music” to save the WORD. But this rejection could not prevent that a new sonic art came back from mouths, pipes, and strings. A Jewish author of the thirteenth century tried to combine the series of notes called “melody,” to which this new sonic art changed what formerly was “sound,” with the letter complexes of creation which are ceaselessly configured by such “melody.” A symbol of this art of Abraham Aboulafia is the figure of the GOLEM. But the GOLEM is mute. The magic text of its creation is sound, but the result of this procedure was not allowed to create an audible resonance in the creation. Again and again sound stays a question of life and death, even today; there sound is a nearly valueless coin of every-day experience as composers from Europe of the last century can testify.
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