Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  Sound effects

  This ontology of events is unsettling, for it proposes that happenings, becomings, and changes exist independently of the subjects and objects that produce or undergo them. To put it another way, it gives priority to the verb, which is no longer conceived as subordinate to the noun. This is exactly the view proposed by that sonic philosopher Nietzsche, who argues that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; the ‘doer’ is only a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (Nietzsche 1992: 481). Or as Henri Bergson put it: “[t]here are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change: change has no need of a support” (Bergson 2007: 122; emphasis in the original).

  If sonic philosophy liberates the deed from the doer, becoming from being, the verb from the noun, it also liberates the effect from the cause. This ontology of the effect is richly developed by Gilles Deleuze, who, inspired by the Stoics, distinguishes between two kinds of entities.3 In the first place, there exist bodies that have various qualities, that act and are acted upon, and that inhabit states of affairs in the world. Yet, in addition to bodies, there exist incorporeal events or effects that are caused by bodies but differ in nature from them. Like Nietzsche, Deleuze asks us to think the ontology of the verb as distinct from that of the noun (bodies) and adjective (qualities): the verb as a pure becoming independent of a subject. Such becomings are best captured by verbs in the infinitive (“to cut,” “to eat,” “to redden,” etc.), which have no subject and are bound to no particular context (Deleuze 1990: 182–5). They simply describe various powers of alteration in the world, powers of becoming that are variously instantiated.

  As continuously varying fluxes that are separable from their causes and maintain their own independent existence, sounds exemplify this ontology of events and becomings, and do so in two senses. In the first place, sounds are not punctual or static objects but temporal, durational flows. They thus accord with an empirical account of events and becomings as processes and alterations. Beyond this empirical sense, sounds are also events and becomings in another sense, a “pure,” “incorporeal,” or “ideal” sense. We saw that sounds are not only “events” but “effects,” results of bodily causes that are nonetheless distinct from those causes and that have an independent existence of their own. But sounds are effects in another sense as well, in the sense in which scientists speak of the “Kelvin effect,” the “Butterfly effect,” or the “Zeeman effect” (Deleuze 1990: 7, 70, 181–2). Such descriptions refer to recurrent patterns of possibility, diffuse multiplicities that nevertheless have a coherence or consistency. The isolation or individuation of such effects is very different than that of a thing, substance, subject, or person. Deleuze calls them “haecceities,” which names a mode of individuation characteristic of events: a wind (the mistral or sirocco, for example), a river, a climate, an hour of the day, a mood, etc. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 261; cf. Deleuze 1987: 92ff, 151–2). “Effects” of this sort arise historically (hence their frequent attribution to the scientist who isolated them) but are recurrent, forming relative invariants that are irreducible to their empirical instances.

  This notion of “effect,” independent of cause, has a broad and important set of usages in the world of audio. Musicians use the term to refer to the distinctive timbral and textural modulations (reverb, fuzz, echo, flange, distortion, etc.) produced by electronic signal processing devices known as “effects units.” Sound researchers Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue have adopted this list of “effects” and expanded it beyond the domain of music to generate a catalogue of eighty-two “sonic effects” (effets sonores) that characterize everyday urban soundscapes: attraction, blurring, chain, dilation, fade, etc. Though inspired by Schaeffer, Augoyard and Torgue abandon Schaeffer’s “object” in favor of Deleuze’s “effect” in an effort to describe the soundscape not as a field of discrete entities but as a flux of haecceities, recurrent but transitory auditory modalities and intensities.4

  An even more extravagant expansion of the notion and number of auditory effects can be found in the archives of “sound effects” employed by the radio and film industries since the 1920s. Ontologically and aesthetically, the “sound effect” is a peculiar entity. Generally anonymous, unattributed to an author or composer, these sounds are produced for incorporation into radio plays, films, TV shows, and video games. Yet they float free of these concrete instances, constituting a general reserve capable of use in very different productions and contexts. In films, they get attached to particular objects and situations in the image track to provide a convincing auditory complement; but they are very often generated from sources and events that have little to do with the objects or situations that receive them. (Sheets of metal produce the sound of thunder, frozen romaine lettuce generates the sound of broken bones, etc.) Moreover, sound effects are often combined with one another to generate new sound effects that diverge further from their components.

  These ontological and aesthetic peculiarities of sound effects have been explored by a number of artists. Working with commercial sound effects libraries, the duo Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh present these effects in their virtual state, as detached sound files indexed by titles that are at once singular and generic (“Amphibian Morph 4 From Rock to Flesh,” “Metal Squeal Huge 2.R,” “Power Buzz, invisible .R”). The sounds themselves likewise manifest this combination of the singular and the generic. Though generated by particular sources and causes, they are capable of signifying and functioning more broadly. Full Metal Jackets (2005), for example, is a sound sculpture composed of thirty-two small speakers scattered down a thirty-foot wall. A computer draws randomly from an archive of 500 sound files documenting falling bullet shell casings, and sends them to the speakers via eight different channels. At the base of the wall and facing it, a monitor lists in real time the file names, which carefully detail the type of casings and the material surfaces on which they fall. Yet, sonically, the installation is remarkably tranquil and non-violent, like a spare, aleatory percussion composition or a cascade of rain. One’s attention is drawn to the timbral and textural differences between the sounds rather than to their real-world or cinematic causal referents.5

  Kubick and Walsh’s sculpture To Make the Sound of Fire (2007) similarly highlights the disjunction between source, sound, and function.6 Consisting of a Plexiglass box containing a few sheets of crumpled wax paper (used by Foley artists to generate the sound of fire), the silent piece invites viewers to imagine the sound such a material might make, and to compare it with their silent mental conjurings of “the sound of fire.” The infinitive title highlights the role of this and all sound effects as haecceities or singularities, elements or processes to be drawn into proximity with others in the incarnation of actual cinematic entities and events.

  Kubick’s recent project Hum Minus Human (2012) nicely brings together several features of the sonic ontology I have been describing.7 A single-channel video, the project presents a nearly randomized sub-catalog of drones collected by searching through a commercial sound effects archive using the keyword “hum” and subtracting those results that turn up “human” sounds. The piece freely combines the sounds of nature, culture, and industry—light transformers and cicadas, arc welders and bumble bees (etymological source of the word “drone” in English)—that form the sonic backdrop of our lives. In one sense, the “minus human” in the title simply describes a search function. But it has a broader significance as well, attuning us to that Cagean, Nietzschean, Schopenhauerian sonic flux that precedes and exceeds human being.

  This conception of the sonic flux—and the ontology of events and effects it affirms—is strange. It unsettles our ordinary ways of speaking, sensing, and conceiving. A philosophical aesthetics that approaches sound and music with a conceptual apparatus already in place will reject it or be deaf to it. Yet, sonic philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schaeffer, Cage, O’Callaghan, Kubick and Walsh do philosophy otherwise. Beginning from a
fascination with sound, they follow it where it leads, encountering a strange world in which bodies are dissolved into flows, objects are the residues of events, and effects are unmoored from their causes to float independently as virtual powers and capacities. To think in this way is to refuse the idealist enterprise that consists in imposing philosophical concepts onto the real, subordinating the real to a set of formal syntheses taken to be ontologically distinct from it. Instead, sonic thought follows the flows of matter and energy that constitute the real, producing concepts that are themselves instances of the syntheses by which the real articulates itself.

  Notes

  1See, for example, Laruelle (2012a: 25ff). In the context of aesthetics, see Laruelle (2012b: 3ff).

  2Quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, §16. For more about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on music and sound, see Cox (2011: 145–61).

  3See, for example, Deleuze (1990: 4ff), Deleuze (1987: 63–6), Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 86ff), and Deleuze (1994: 21, 126–7, 156ff).

  4On Deleuze’s notions of event and effect, see Augoyard and Torgue (2005: 10, 154n16). Deleuze briefly discusses “sound effects” as instances of incorporeal events in The Logic of Sense (1990: 7, 70, 181–2).

  5The project is documented at http://www.doublearchive.com/projects/full_metal_jackets.php (accessed October 13, 2013).

  6See http://www.doublearchive.com/projects/make_sound_of_fire.php (accessed October 13, 2013).

  7An excerpt can be found at http://www.socalledsound.com (accessed October 13, 2013).

  Works Cited

  Augoyard, J.-F. and H. Torgue, eds (2005), Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, trans. A. McCartney and D. Paquette. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.

  Austin, J. L. (1962), Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  Bergson, H. (2007), “The Perception of Change”, in The Creative Mind. Mineola, NY: Dover.

  Cox, C. (2011), “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism, Journal of Visual Culture, 10(2) (August): 145–61.

  DeLanda, M. (1997), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone.

  Deleuze, G. (1987), Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Deleuze, G. (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  Laruelle, F. (2012a), “A Summary of Non-Philosophy”, in G. Alkon and B. Gunjevic (eds), The Non-Philosophy Project. New York: Telos Press.

  Laruelle, F. (2012b), Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. D. S. Burk. Minneapolis: Univocal.

  Lippard, L. (1973), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  Nietzsche, F. (1992), On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, §13, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library.

  O’Callaghan, C. (2007), Sounds: A Philosophical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Schaeffer, P. (2004), “Acousmatics”, in C. Cox and D. Warner (eds), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum.

  Schopenhauer, A. (1969), The World as Will and Representation, volume I, trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover.

  6

  in|human rhythms

  Bernd Herzogenrath

  Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.

  Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

  In many ways, the twentieth century can be regarded as art’s attempts to escape the “tyranny of meter” [“Tyrannei des Tactes”] (Schumann 1854: 126).1 This phrase is Robert Schumann’s, and he himself tried to free himself from that “law of metric cruelty” [“Gesetz der Tactesschwere”] (125) by ever finer and braver syncopations (see, e.g., his Kreisleriana and Kinderszenen).

  For the American context, Charles Ives breathes a similar sensibility. Henry and Sidney Cowell report, that “Ives’s whole approach to his complex rhythms should be understood as an attempt to persuade players away from the straitjacket of regular beats, with which complete exactness is impossible anyhow” (Cowell and Cowell 1955: 172). Instead, the performance should strive for a “variety of rhythmic tensions and muscular stresses that make constant slight changes of pace” (ibid. 173)—Ives’s “Over the Pavements” may serve as an example here.

  It might be argued, though (as, e.g., Saxer does), that all these Modernist attempts to evade what Nabokov has called the “miserable measurement of time” (1969: 538) are still marching (in relation to) a steady beat, be it in their scores (which still betray an adherence to “traditional notation”), be it in ever more adventurous deviations from that pulse (see, e.g., Messiaen’s “added value rhythms,” “symmetrical permutations,” “non-retrogradable rhythms,” etc.).

  So, is there a way to think rhythm otherwise?

  For Deleuze and Guattari, the “tyranny of meter” is related to it being a non-productive (or only reproductive) and thus empty periodicity, a static repetition that does not produce difference, a difference they relate to becoming: “Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a non-communicating milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 313). Metric repetition is thus the repetition of the identical, creating equal units of time, whereas rhythm—real productive repetition, repetition with a difference—involves inequalities, maybe non-linear logics: intensities that create “incommensurabilities between metric equivalent periods or spaces” (Deleuze 1994: 21).

  These equivalent metrical periods are what clock-time consists of—as Frank Kermode has so beautifully put it in his The Sense of an Ending, “[t]he clock’s ‘tick-tock’ I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organisation which humanises time by giving it a form; and the interval between ‘tock’ and ‘tick’ represents purely successive, disorganised time of the sort we need to humanise” (Kermode 1967: 45). The disorganized time “in between,” the non-pulsed “time in its pure state” (Deleuze 1989: xi) is thus what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhythm.2

  According to Deleuze and Guattari, as they outline in their Plateau “On the Refrain,” rhythm and the refrain are closely connected to a certain territory and geography, and simultaneously to the forces of deterritorialization, and of becoming. In turn becoming itself is closely connected to a notion of geography—“[b]ecomings belong to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exit” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 2). Deleuze’s concept of “history as becoming” thus reveals a close proximity to the “geohistory” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 95) of Fernand Braudel—“[g]eography wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility of contingency” (ibid.: 96). With the concept of longue durée, Braudel commented on the “geographic aspects” of (historical) time itself. According to Braudel (1982: 74), “[h]istory exists at different levels, I would even go so far as to say three levels but that would be simplifying things too much.” History—thus Braudel, thus Deleuze—happens at ten, at a hundred levels and time spans [at a thousand plateaus] simultaneously. This coexistent and dynamic becoming is to the static succession of being what locus is to datum, space is to time, and in analogy regards “geography as opposed to history, the rhizome as opposed to arborescence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 296). History is a rhizome that historiography aims at translating into an arborescent order, with the rhizome standing for the complex interplay of necessity and chance, human and non-human, culture and materiality, intention and self-organization. />
  This notion of geohistory corresponds to a perspective on rhythm of one of the profoundest “escape artists” of the metric tyranny—Olivier Messiaen. In a dialogue with the internationally renowned organist and interpreter of Messiaen’s organ works Almut Rößler, Messiaen puts forward a “time-philosophical” notion of rhythms:

  What could be more useful for a musician to create a link between movement and change … Of even greater significance, however, will be an awareness of time-scales, superimposed on each other, which surrounds us: the endlessly long time of the stars, the very long time of the mountains, the middling one of the human being, the short one of insects, the very short one of atoms (not to mention the time-scales inherent in ourselves—the physiological, the psychological). Whenever the composer sets the tempo-change machine going, he’ll become conscious of these different slownesses, these different quicknesses.

  Rößler 1986: 40

  Deleuze and Guattari’s own concept of rhythm (and of the refrain) owes much to Messiaen’s experimentations. When Messiaen refers to the composer’s “tempo-change-machine,” he basically talks about a synchronization of nature (that other tempo-change machine) and the composer’s activity. Even if Messiaen’s notion of nature still smacks of a transcendental concept (a God-centered harmonious kosmos), one can easily see how Deleuze and Guattari adapt that idea and relate it to their machinic conception of nature. Nature thus becomes un-natural, in-human—machinic. From such a perspective, Messiaen’s (and also Braudel’s) classification of different time-scales and time-spans relates to a notion of the in|human that I want to discuss here in connection to three different composers and works. What I would like to call in|human corresponds to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “inhuman” reading of the term “inhuman,” which “signifies ‘not human,’ of course, and therefore includes a world of forces, objects and nonhuman beings. But in-human also indicates the alien within (any human body is an ecosystem filled with strange objects)” (Cohen 2014: 271)—a materialist, anti-“human”istic perspective that sees “the human” inextricably connected to and even emerging from in|human forces.