Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  Dunn 1992:

  Dunn’s description of the alien sounds (clicks, sawtooth) is reminiscent of computer music (Dunn is a pioneer of electronic music himself). And indeed, Achim Szepanski, former owner and founder of the labels Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux, has explained that in Techno, “you can hear a multitude of noises, shrieks, chirps, creaks, and whizzes. These are all sounds traditionally associated with madness.… Techno in this sense is schizoid music” (quoted in Anz and Walder 1995: 140–41). For Deleuze|Guattari, these sounds point towards a becoming-insect, towards a molecular deterritorialization of the territorializing refrains of birdsong:

  the reign of birds seems to have been replaced by the age of insects, with its much more molecular vibrations, chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching, and scraping. Birds are vocal, but insects are instrumental: drums and violins, guitars and cymbals. A becoming-insect has replaced becoming-bird, or forms a block with it. The insect is closer, better able to make audible the truth that all becomings are molecular.

  Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3087

  In his sonic becoming-insect[s], then, Dunn deterritorializes the territorial refrains of different insects in order to make expressive the concept that everything is connected, and that mind—or consciousness—is not a human quale, but the multiplicity of virtual connections, intra- and interspecies, human and non-human: in|human.

  in|human rhythms: the cardiac and respiration system

  Richard Reed Parry—Music for Heart and Breath

  In 1988, the Swedish Pop duo Roxette issued a double command to everybody willing to obey—they not only released their second studio album Look Sharp!, the album also featured their hit single “Listen To Your Heart.” The lyrics of this song show that to listen to one’s heart equals to listen to your feelings, emotions, to the cultured expertise of one who “truly loves”—and all this in 86 bpm. The mathematical/metronomic indication of beats per minute seemingly correlates the musical metrum with a bodily, organic function—that of the heartbeat. From this perspective, Roxette’s 86 bpm is in a significant mismatch with the emotional state this song talks about—nothing excited/exciting about this measure, a bpm number of 60 to 100 signifies regular heart activity, while with 120 bpm we enter zones of excitation. But 86 bpm relates rather to a state of sitting on the couch than of emotional turmoil—it thus rather follows the standard rules and conventions of a soft rock ballad, of a cultural refrain, that is.

  What is even more important—the cardiogenic mimesis of the bpm-system is in itself already a stabilization of a more chaotic rhythmic milieu, an abstraction. Consider the following quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

  We are lovers of rhyme and return, period and musical reflection. The babe is lulled to sleep by the nurse’s song. Sailors can work better for their yo-heave-o. Soldiers can march better and fight better for the drum and trumpet. Metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and ex-halation of the lungs. If you hum or whistle the rhythm of the common English metres,—of the decasyllabic quatrain, or the octosyllabic with alternate sexisyllabic, or other rhythms, you can easily believe these metres to be organic, derived from the human pulse, and to be therefore not proper to one nation, but to mankind.

  Emerson 1875: 41–2

  Emerson here clearly locates the origin of rhythm (in poetry, in music, etc.) in the organic movements of walking and heartbeat (in close d’accord with the fact that much of (post)Transcendentalist Poetry was structured not by the metrics of “good poetry,” but determined by the length of breath). However—it is meter he is talking about, not rhythm. English meters and the marching rhythm are in fact no rhythms at all—Messiaen complained about this, and Deleuze and Guattari followed—“there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march” (1987: 313). Meter thus is revealed as a territorializing refrain, a stabilization and regulation of the different rhythmic chaotic milieus of the human body. Thus, if you actually listen to your heart, you will not get a clean bpm-structure, but something more chaotic, more non-linear.

  “As animals our lives are marked by rhythms, and the rhythmical activities of ventilation and heart beat are tangible evidence of the life force in each of us” (Taylor et al. 1999: 900). But what about the “subtle processes of generation, regulation, and integration of these internal rhythms” (ibid.)?

  Meter—marches, sonnets, bpm, Roxette—are linear systems, and linear systems are well-behaved. Because of their regular repetition of identical patterns, they can be completely understood and even predicted—by dissecting them into their components, which always add up. Non-linear systems, on the other hand, do not add up—dissection will not work here, because the components are coupled, looped, involved in emergent processes. The research on the seeming synchronicity of crickets and fireflies, mentioned in the section on David Dunn, is also interesting because cardiac pacemaker cells function in a similar manner—the heart beats in a non-linear way, with subtle but complex fluctuations. Indeed, a completely regular heartbeat in homeostasis might signify illness, while the slightly chaotic fluctuations might indicate a healthy state8 (with the flat-line as both the point zero and point of infinity of metric regularity). The same, one might argue, goes for the respiratory system, and, in addition, these two systems are not only interdependent, but also coupled to hormonal and chemical stimuli (in|human here with the stress on “in” as an inclusive preposition), external excitations: a myriad of interconnected internal, external, intermediate, etc. rhythmic milieus, “differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity” (Deleuze 1994: 222)—so much for your bpm.

  So, how if one TAKEs THAT as a “rhythmic template”?

  Enter Richard Reed Parry.

  The multi-instrumentalist of your favorite Indie-Rock-Band Arcade Fire is also a classically trained musician and composer, who fearlessly and successfully straddles the two worlds of Pop and Classical—a tightrope-act he shares with the likes of Bryce Dessner (The National), Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) and Glen Kotche (Wilco).

  Parry’s Music for Heart and Breath (2014) listens to one’s heart in a mode very different from Roxette’s. With the musicians of these pieces wearing stethoscopes, “the concept for the entire record … is that every note and everything that any of the musicians plays is played either in sync with the heartbeat of that player or with their breathing or with the breathing of another player. And it depends piece-to-piece what exactly is happening” (Parry 2014a).9 Referring to the influence of Cage, Reich, and Eno that Parry cites in his “Liner Notes,” one could say that Music for Heart and Breath ingeniously combines Cage’s indeterminism, Reich’s phasing, and Eno’s idea of Generative Music. But I’d argue there is more to Parry’s very singular way of trying to escape from the tyranny of meter.

  The players of Music for Heart and Breath have to listen to their own bodily rhythms as well as to those of their co-players, while at the same time external stimuli (responses of the audience) and internal stimuli (excitation of the players, the feedback-loop of responding to responses, etc.) further destabilize the rhythmics of the piece being played. Parry’s compositions attempt to “translate directly into music the quiet internal rhythms of the body … to guide and shape the dynamics of the pieces … following the subtly rhythmic ‘instructions’ of the body” (Parry 2014b: 6)—we need to add, though, that because of the complex feedback loops mentioned, we cannot be speaking of “internal rhythms” alone, rather of rhythms situated at the fold of inside|outside. The musicians body thus becomes a pivotal instrument in the performance—the body, that according to commentators from Roland Barthes to noted American jazz pianist and composer Yijay Iyer has always been suppressed in (cultural constructivist or semiotic) interpretations of music.

  Consider Barthes’ love for Schumann. Listening to Schumann’s Kreisleriana (Opus 16, 1838), Barthes claims that he does not hear notes, themes, or even meaning—“I hear this body that beats” (1991: 299
). However, interpretations and performances of that beating body that Barthes hears—“there is no beating except the heart’s” (1991: 302)—are rendered too docile, in general, those beats are played “too timidly; the body which takes possession of them is almost always a mediocre body, trained, streamlined by years of Conservatory or career, or, more simply by the interpreter’s insignificance, his indifference” (1991: 303).

  For Parry’s Music for Heart and Breath, it takes an interpreter not indifferent to the differences in intensity that the beating heart provides. Barthes’ description of the “mediocre” and streamlined Conservatory player, a highly trained technician of music, might be described in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms as a “paranoiac performer.”

  For Deleuze|Guattari, the body ultimately oscillates between two poles, “the paranoiac, reactionary, and fascizising pole, and the schizoid revolutionary pole” (1992: 366). It is important to point out that, despite the origin of the terms “paranoiac” and “schizoid” in psychoanalysis, Deleuze|Guattari have chosen the terms to refer to different logics and dynamics of social organization. Whereas paranoia designates an Oedipal and ultimately transcendental mode of a hierarchically structured and rigidly segmented, striated, and solid body, controlled by an external authority, schizophrenia marks liberating potentialities and “lines of flight,” vectors of deterritorialization, a fluid body constituted by openness, dynamics, self-organization, and by a constant “becoming.” Thus, while the “paranoiac performer” is Maestro or click-track fixated, what Music for Heart and Breath calls for is indeed a “schizzo performer,” open to the irregular dynamics of his own body, to rhythms that are not metric and solid (“Solid as a Rock”), but fluid and marked by intensive differences.10

  The headline of the NPR interview with Arun Rath claims that “Richard Reed Parry Turns Musicians into Metronomes”—which in fact he does not: the irregular rhythms of heart and breath provide anything but stable metric regularity, the effect is rather a stuttering.

  Deleuze has related the concepts of “stammering” and “stuttering” to the question of style. And even though he mostly related stuttering to the realm of literature, I argue that stuttering bears a close affinity to the ideas of “rhythm” and “rhizome.” Taking his cue from Proust, Deleuze claims that “great literature is written in a kind of foreign language” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 5). To write or speak in a foreign language is to write and speak in a minor and deterritorialized language, escaping the solidified and molarized variables, variations, potentialities—virtualities—of any major language, making any “language” (literal, symbolic, music) “affective and intensive” (Deleuze 1997: 107). It is this deterritorializing and rhizomatic quality that links the idea of stuttering to the rhythmic complexities of Music for Heart and Breath—Rhizome is a Dancer!

  In their various attempts to escape from the “tyranny of meter,” Adams, Dunn, and Parry have also commented on what might be called “Music in the Age of the Anthropocene.” 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—form as a molar concept tied to the intentionality of a subject that in|forms brute matter:

  [t]here is no longer a form, but only relations of velocity between infinitesimal particles of an unformed material. There is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an anonymous force. Here the plan is concerned only with motions and rests, with dynamic affective charges.

  Deleuze 1988: 128

  These rhythmic “relations of velocity” ultimately reveal rhythm as the in|human non-linear pulsation of life—“a life”—that escapes conscious control and the all-too-human “tyranny of meter.”

  Notes

  1See also Saxer (2004).

  2Deleuze refers to the Proustian idea of “time in its pure state” also on his IRCAM Seminar on music (Deleuze 1978)—hence, a vague correspondence between meter—movement-image and rhythm—time-image might be proposed.

  3Adams, it has to be noted, is also an environmental activist and founder of Alaska’s Green Party. Mitchell Morris thus dubs Adams a “ ‘Green’ composer” (1998: 131), referring, however, to the notion of ecology as in Deep Ecology, whereas I would suggest to place Adams firmly within a Deleuzian Ecology that is based on a non-dualist ontology.

  4Strange and Sacred Noise is a concert-length cycle of six movements for percussion quartet. Its first and last movements (“… dust into dust …” and “… and dust rising …”) are based on the Cantor set and Cantor dust (the two-dimensional version of the Cantor set). These fractals model the behavior of electrical noise, which Adams takes as a diagram for the percussion set to explore “the dynamic form of the Cantor dust, whereby in an infinite process, line segments are divided into two segments by the removal of their middle third” (Feisst n.d.). See also Feisst (2001: 4–14).

  5A direct Leibnizian reference can be found in his New Essays on Human Understanding: “To hear this noise as we do, we must hear the parts which make up this whole, that is the noise of each wave, although each of these little noises makes itself known only when combined confusedly with all the others, and would not be noticed if the wave which made it were by itself … [w]e must have some perception of each of these noises, however faint they may be; otherwise there would be no perception of a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand nothings cannot make something” (Leibniz 1996: 55). Such a “sonorous ocean,” it can be argued, the becoming-perceptible of micro-sounds “underneath the [human] radar,” also provides a more materialist version of the Pythagorean idea of “sphere music”: contrary to a the harmonious universe rotating according to “well-tempered” intervals, it would refer to the multiplicity of sounds of “the world”—nature changes constantly, everything moves, and everything that moves oscillates according to a certain frequency, the total result of which would be white noise (the murmur of the universe). Such a concept, I argue, also defines much of today’s electronic music (see, e.g., Murphy 2004, in particular 161–2). Lately, Adams has transferred the sound of the little waves that make up a sonorous body of water in his Pulitzer-Prize awarded Becoming Ocean (2014).

  6My translation of: “On ne doit pas dire, pensaient-ils: ‘L’arbre est vert,’ mais: ‘L’arbre verdoie’ … Ce qui s’exprime dans le jugement, ce n’est pas une propriété comme: un corps est chaud, mais une èvénement comme: un corps s’échauffe.”

  7Compare with Deleuze|Guattari who point out that “a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial or assemblage refrain, in order to transform it from within, deterritorialized, producing a refrain of the second type as the final end of music: the cosmic refrain of a sound machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 349).

  8See Goldberger et al. (1990).

  9This concept had already been put to use by American composer Christopher Shultis in his 1994 piece “Written on the body, for musicians and dancers,” where the musicians “have a contact microphone attached to any part of the body that produces an audible heartbeat. This is amplified into an earpiece that is placed into the musician’s other ear.”

  10 See also Szekely (2003) for a somewhat similar observation.

  Works cited

  Adams, J. L. (1994), “Resonance of Place.” The North American Review CCLXXIX: 1 (Jan/Feb) 8–18.

  Adams, J. L. (1998a), “Sonic Geography of the Arctic. An Interview with Gayle Young.” Available online: http://www.johnlutheradams.com/interview/gayleyoung.html (accessed July 8, 2015).

  Adams, J. L. (1998b), “Strange and Sacred Noise,” Yearbook of Soundscape Studies. Vol. 1: “Northern Soundscapes.” R. M. Schafer and H. Järviluoma (eds). Tampere, 143–6.

  Adams, J. L. (2006a), “In Search of a
n Ecology of Music.” Available online: http://www.johnlutheradams.com/writings/ecology.html (accessed July 8, 2015).

  Adams, J. L. (2006b), quoted in A. Mayer, “Northern Exposure: A museum exhibit converts activity in the Alaskan environment into an ever changing sound show,” Boston Globe, April 16, 2006.

  Adams, J. L. (2015), quoted in Living On Earth, radio interview with A. Mayer. Available online: www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=06-P13-00016&segmentID=5 (accessed July 8, 2015).

  Anz, P. and P. Walder, eds (1995), Techno. Zürich: Verlag Ricco Bilger.

  Barthes, R. (1991), “Rasch”, The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. R. Howard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 299–312.

  Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts. London and New York: Routledge.

  Braudel, F. (1982), “History and Sociology”, On History, trans. S. Matthews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 64–82.

  Bréhier, E. (1970), La théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoicisme. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin.

  Cage, J. (1981), For the Birds. John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. Boston and London: Marion Boyars.

  Cohen, J. J., ed. (2014), “Grey”, Prismatic Ecology. Ecotheory Beyond Green. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 270–89.

  Cowell, H. and S. Cowell (1955), Charles Ives and His Music, Oxford: Oxford UP.

  Deleuze, G. (1978), “IRCAM Conference Presentation on Musical Time”, trans. T. Murphy. Available online: www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=113&groupe=Conf%E9rences&langue=2(accessed July 8, 2015).