Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  Table 1 TenHouten’s conceptual models of Ordinary-Linear and Patterned-cyclical forms of time-consciousness (TenHouten 1999)

  Ordinary-Linear Time Patterned-Cyclical Time

  linear, time as a single dimension

  dualistic, split into two levels of reality

  separation of past, present, and future

  fusion of past, present, and future

  regularity, continuity, and homogeneity

  irregularity, discontinuity, and heterogeneity

  clock orientation and calendar orientation

  event orientation and nature-based orientation

  diachronic ordering of events: priority, simultaneity, posteriority

  synchronic ordering of events; cyclical, patterned, oscillatory

  quantitative: numerical measurements; an invariant anchor or a zero point

  qualitative: nonnumerical measurements; now the anchor point

  the experience of time as a series of fleeting moments

  the experience of long duration

  In terms of how these temporal structures are present in musical form we can see that, in an albeit rather simplistic sense, the notion of an eternal now is clearly embodied in the extended sonic forms of didgeridoo music and its circular breathing techniques. Rose (2000) suggests that temporality, being present within a boundless now, in this context literally “pours through the person.” Although the form of this specific sound is subject to temporal modulation, its continuous and extended envelope and extreme duration share features associated with pattern-cyclical time-consciousness. Given that this specific musical practice takes the form of singular extended tone, it does not easily fit into the Husserlian melody diagram of music where individual notes form a larger whole.

  To my Western ears the timings present in Australian Aboriginal rhythmic structures appear rather extemporaneous. These events do not follow a strict temporal meta-grid of equally spaced events of mathematically related duration, nor are they placed along side the hypothetical clock of Western temporality that “ticks on even if nothing occurs” (Swain 1993). The flow and variability of these musical structures seems to imply what Swain has called the fundamental statement that “events occur.” Here percussive events do not march toward the observer in a sort of military style from the future and into the past; they do not announce their arrival like the considered, meticulous or grandiose musical structures of the Western tradition—they simply occur. Similarly Rose (2000) attempts to show how the Aboriginal priority of place over time, and the notion of an infinite now are encoded within Aboriginal dance and music. In the context of what she describes as a move from geometric time to embodied and geographic time she writes:

  The poetics of time, its patterns, waves, and interlocking rhythms work with the politics of correct performances, to transform cosmogonic potential into living action. […] Time, rather than being rendered static or absent, becomes experientially and overwhelmingly focussed, present and shared. The person flips from being an actor in time to becoming a heartbeat of time.

  Rose 2000

  This brief description of Aboriginal cosmogony and culture aims to demonstrate the non-universality of (a) the musical framework alluded to by Husserl, and (b) the character of temporality that he has aligned with it. But even if we only take Husserl’s account of melody as “overlapping-events” as a description of Western classical musics it remains blatantly clear that the Husserlian music diagram is a gross oversimplification. Clarke (2011) for instance points out that Husserl’s description of music assumes that one event stops before the other starts, whereas this is not universally true of musical structures. He also demonstrates how musical phrases are not only bonded in terms of “temporal congruity,” but also through “similarity and equivalence” which suggest, according to Clarke, that in musical terms retention and recollection interact in a process that “radically expands the temporal depth of field.” This re-presentation is “imbued with the cumulative, ongoing presence of all the elapsed piece behind it.” I agree with Clarke’s suggestion that Husserl’s analysis of musical temporality is rather one-dimensional as it ignores the complex multi-dimensional interplay of repetitive structures at play in Western musics. Although Clarke is effective in showing how Husserl’s references to music miss out the multi-layering of temporality fundamental to the organization of Western musics, we should not forget that Husserl’s main concern is not with a description of temporality in music, but of temporality as it appears to us. In this sense Clarke’s analysis does not necessarily unpick Husserl’s position, but it does reveal his fundamental prejudices; it shows how his descriptions of both time-experience and time structures in music are equally grounded in a Western metaphysical tradition.

  To some of us this interest in non-linear musical temporality might seem overtly familiar. La Monte Young for example, in reference to the prolonged sustained tones present in his works, states:

  we determined at a certain point that our medium was time … I think that this kind of sense of time has to do with getting away from the earthly sense of direction which goes from birth to death, in other words, like developmental form, and has to do with static form.

  Nagoski, n.d.

  Kramer identifies an absence of linear process in music which he calls “Vertical time” (1988) and suggests that the listener: “give up expectation and enter the vertical time of the work—where linear expectation, implication, cause, effect, antecedents, and consequents do not exist” (Kramer 1988). Referring to Meyer’s term “nonteleological music” (2010), Kramer compares encounters with such temporality to “looking at a piece of sculpture.” Here music does not move purposefully towards a predetermined resolution, it is not a narrative that takes the listener along some emotionally planned journey. Kramer’s looking-at time as a mode of encountering musical temporality can perhaps be likened to Tudor’s (1972) comment on Cage’s Music of Changes—that it seemed more like watching time as opposed to feeling it. Generally speaking, however, I am not a fan of these works or the rhetoric that surrounds their consumption. My primary objection to this work is not its sonic or aesthetic character, but how that character promotes specific responses in audiences. I feel this plays upon a whole host of cultural assumptions and prejudices (for example the objectification, simplification, and commodification of Eastern culture and religious belief, for a largely white, middle class, Western audience) while simultaneously promoting itself as somehow cathartic, therapeutic, and liberating.

  My critique of Husserl’s analysis of temporality aims to show that both the object and how we encounter it are culturally determined: there is no such thing as phenomenological reduction that is free of “prior knowledge or preconception” (Cogan n.d.). Similarly, the idea that when we listen to a piece of music we somehow conveniently forget whatever cultural baggage we dragged with us into the room is not a view that I would readily accept. For example I do not hear Aboriginal Australian musics the way an Aboriginal Australian might. For me the reported escape from the regularity and linearity of Western temporal meta-grid clearly only serves to reassert an implied acceptance of its omnipresence. Comments like “time stood still” or “time slowed down” merely highlight the fact that anomalous temporal experiences of this sort are understood and interpreted within a resolutely linear-timeline paradigm of the sort formalized by TenHouten. If someone reports that time slowed down, it necessarily means that they assume that time “moves” at a certain regular speed; similarly if time is said to have stopped, it also necessarily means that it is thought of as a thing that fundamentally passes. We do not typically hear these kinds of accounts of weird temporal distortions from Australian Aboriginal communities themselves. In each case the temporal anomaly is compared to a temporal norm and thus the anomalous experience is thought of as a pathological exception akin to, but unfortunately never as extreme as, drug or near death experiences. So for me the production and consumption of these supposed a-temporal musical structures, alt
hough often extremely pleasurable, should perhaps be seen as an example of the role play I described earlier—perhaps a way of partially ignoring one’s cultural and cognitive hereditaments but certainly not overcoming them.

  Finally I want to discuss how Husserl’s beliefs about temporality and music also crop up in the now ubiquitous time-line-based music composition and editing softwares that dominate most recording studios, mastering suites, and home studio setups. These have typically become the nucleic component around which everything else is connected. It is astounding to think how closely the time-line model, derived from the Western score, resembles the linear time paradigm described by TenHouten. It is also interesting how this method is considered to be a standard within which any arrangement of notes and sounds is possible. But such accolades miss the finer yet fundamental point that time-line environments structure our thinking and our practices around a linear time paradigm. We are forced to stop, pause, rewind, think ahead—basically adopt the role of a remote pseudo-Cartesian outside-the-temporal-landscape subject in order to manipulate our musical materials. Musical composition thus becomes a determinate act of planning, foresight, narrative development, and so on; each change becomes labored over, each development clearly considered by an intentional agent that is separate from the temporal domain within which the development takes place. The process of composition in this environment becomes an act of remote control of materials.

  It is interesting that Logic, perhaps the most prominent software of its kind, began life as Notator, a system that initially structured music in terms of the organization and re-use of a bank of patterns. As Notator evolved, this pattern-based feature was dropped in favor of a spatially organized linear temporal environment within which events could be given an order and viewed as a whole from a vantage point beyond the temporal domain of the work. I assume this decision was made because it more accurately reflected the assumption that this was what music was really like—organized sound. The timeline’s governing principle is to organize, to constitute the musician as mere organizer of sound.

  For me this characteristic has always presented creative difficulties, as well as ideological problems. But in recent years other paradigms have become more popular. Cycling 74’s Max uses a flowchart-like interface to construct different procedural, compositional, and performance-based systems. The visual-spatial programing metaphor offered by these softwares closely resemble the features of pattern-cyclical time-consciousness. Table 2, derived from TenHouten’s “Conceptual Models of Ordinary-Linear and Patterned-Cyclical Forms of Time-Consciousness,” is intended to illustrate this correspondence.

  The table shows how the timeline method found in much music composition software is both derived from and sustains the features present in “Ordinary-Linear Time Consciousness.” Here time is divided into past, present, and future; time flows at a constant rate, in one direction; it has a determinate now point—the first person division between the past and the future; events are predetermined, regular, and repeatable; time is divided into equal and related parts. The visual programming environment, by contrast, has a spatial character; time (and its division into past, present, and future) is not a necessary feature of this environment, here events “merely occur” (Swain 1993). The division of time into regular and related temporal units is rejected in favor of divisions of indeterminate duration—variable measurement. Although this feature is possible within timeline environments, such environments are certainly not conducive to works exploring this characteristic. Unlike time-line-based approaches the visual programming environment does not have an absolute start point; neither does it construct a temporal landscape divided into a series of moments moving between past and future; instead it foregrounds what is happening now. In this sense the music composer, producer, or performer becomes something other than a mere remote, disembodied, outside-time, organizer of sound.

  Table 2 Comparison between modes of time consciousness and music softwares (TenHouten 1999)

  Timeline Visual Programming Environment

  linear time as single dimension

  space as two dimensional

  separation of past, present, and future

  past, present, and future not represented

  regularity, continuity

  irregularity, discontinuity

  clock orientation

  event orientation

  diachronic ordering of events: priority,

  synchronic ordering of events: cyclical,

  simultaneity, posteriority

  patterned, oscillatory

  metrical measurement, time divided into

  variable measurement

  equal and related segments

  an invariant anchor or zero point

  now as the anchor point

  time as a series of ordered moments

  the infinite now, events just occur

  Note

  1In 2011 I took part in a discussion group chaired by Tony Myatt at Supersimetria—“New Languages in Computer Music,” Barcelona. This included myself, Curtis Roads, and Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. Since then I corresponded with Roads during the developing of “Composing with Process,” a radio series commission by Radio Web MACBA for an episode addressing treatments of time in generative musics.

  Works cited

  Clarke, D. (2011), “Music, Phenomenology, Time Consciousness: Meditations after Husserl,” in D. Clarke and E. Clarke (eds), Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Cogan, J. (n.d.), Phenomenological Reduction. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://www.iep.utm.edu/phen-red/ (accessed May 18, 2015).

  Davidson, G. R. and L. Z. Klich (1980), Cultural Factors in the Development of Temporal and Spatial Ordering. Child Development 51(2): 569. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1129294 (accessed October 2, 2015).

  Elkin, A. P. (1969), Elements of Australian Aboriginal Philosophy. Oceania x(2): 85–98.

  Gallagher, S. (1998), The Inordinance of Time. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

  Hassard, J. (1990), The Sociology of Time. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Limited.

  Heidegger, M. (1962), Being and Time. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.

  Heidegger, M. (2002), Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

  Husserl, E. (1992), On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

  Kramer, J. D. (1988), The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel Verlag GmbH.

  Kuhn, J. R. (1990), Measured Appearances: Documentation and Design in Early Perspective Drawing. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53: 114–32.

  Larrabee, M. J. (1993), Inside Time-consciousness: Diagramming the Flux. Husserl Studies 10(3): 181–210. Available online: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01386689 (accessed October 2, 2015).

  Macey, S. (1994), Encyclopaedia of Time. London: Taylor & Francis.

  Metzinger, T. (2003), BEING NO ONE, The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

  Meyer, L. B. (2010), Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Nagoski, I. (n.d.), La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela: An Interview by Ian Nagoski. Available online: http://www.halana.com/lymz.html (accessed September 4, 2013).

  Nietzsche, F. (1891), Thus Spake Zarathustra: A book for All and None.

  Roads, C. (2004), Microsound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Rose, D. B. (2000), To Dance with Time: A Victoria River Aboriginal Study. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 11(2): 287–96. Available online: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1835-9310.2000.tb00044.x/abstract (accessed October 2, 2015).

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  Swain, T. (1993), A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  TenHouten, W. D. (1997), Primordial Temporality, the Self, and the Brain. Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 20(3): 253–79. Available online: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10617361/20 (accessed October 2, 2015).

  TenHouten, W. D. (1999), Text and Temporality: Patterned-Cyclical and Ordinary-Linear Forms of Time-Consciousness, Inferred from a Corpus of Australian Aboriginal and Euro-Australian Life-Historical Interviews. Symbolic Interaction 22(2), 121–37. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.1999.22.2.121 (accessed October 2, 2015).

  Tudor, D. (1972), From Piano to Electronics. Music and Musicians. 2024–6.

  Wright, L. (1983), Perspective in Perspective. London: Routledge.

  11

  How to Think Sonically? On the Generativity of the Flesh

  Holger Schulze

  As I am writing and rereading this chapter, it is rather early on a hot summer’s morning and I mostly hear heavy traffic outside my window; I am still waking up, a hot cup of tea with sugar and milk at my side. It seems that I selectively try to exclude these rather unwanted noises right now, this mixture of accelerating cars and a steadily humming hard drive—but they are present all the same. Composed and intentionally designed sound is shaping this moment together with a whole lot of unwanted noise, forming a whole of almost indiscernible sounds. Before you started reading this chapter you might have browsed over some of the other contributions to this volume. Doing that, you might have fantasized about this sound or that noise: from the nineteenth century, from ancient cultures, or archeologically and forensically reconstructed and imagined soundscapes. While doing so, you might have been enveloped in a drone of sounds from your hard drive, from the outside traffic, your mobile phone, and from the upstairs neighbors. These sounds constitute the wild and erratic population of everyday listening, which have not been domesticated, neither aesthetically nor discursively—and not at all technically—until recently. Your and my listening experience consist of largely contradictory, mingled and highly dynamic sound events, sonic drones, and threads of listening. Might contingency and mingledness be some of the foremost qualities of this erratic population you call sound?