Thinking of music in terms of sound(s) also makes it sonically determined and internally discretized, something composed of a specific sound or a collection of specific sounds, of sonic objects that can have fixed and recognizable identities. Owing to the semantic leakage between “sound” and “timbre,” sonocentrism can all too easily collapse music’s multidimensional differences into those of determined timbres. For example, a rhythm such as one might read from notation can be ontologically independent of specific “sounds”—it is a musical object that cannot be reduced to a sonic object, or an object made of determinate sound or sounds. Granted, it cannot be manifested without sounds at the point of performance, but its identity and ontology as an object is not inherently a definite or determined timbral identity. It is more deeply representative of the possibilities of music to begin with the idea of difference and change, before these patterns coalesce into sonic “objects” for either composer or listener.
Rather than sonic objects, these differences can be specified as particular variables constrained to particular values or ranges of values. Most famously, in music these variables are pitch, volume, timbre, and duration or time, with values such as 440Hz, 23dB, five seconds, or sine wave respectively. There are, however, many more variables that can be considered in the creation and aesthetics of music, involving space, aspects of listening, non-sonic variables and complex categories such as rhythm, harmony, and melody (in fact, in some cases there are only two variables—amplitude of a sound wave and time). It is collections of these variables and values, irrespective of sound, that form subcategories of music as a whole, musical objects. This is where musical difference becomes information and indeed, thought, since a constrained variable constitutes a piece of information.
But it would be wrong to consider this information absolutely or objectively derived. Rather, it is generated by thought, with music and thought reciprocally constituting one another. It is through a socially, culturally, and psychologically mediated musicking that musical objects become subjectively and provisionally generated patterns or spaces of information, that is to say, thoughts. Philosophy conforms to an Image of Thought in the same way, and thus music conforms an Image of Music. In fact, just as we can talk about musical objects as subcategories of music, so we can talk about images of music without capital letters and in the plural, as mediated versions of particular musical objects. We could talk of images of melody, of the piano, of jazz, or of particular musicians, even of images of musical novelty itself.
Every instance of musicking, as well as musical objects away from performance strictly defined, generates an image of music: an idea about and perception of its difference and repetition, both internal to the musicking and between musickings. Composing, performing, and listening are ultimately the same activity: the constituting of images of music, and they regulate and are regulated by aesthetic responses. They discriminate between all the potential pieces of information musicking can offer a listener and come to constitute a particular informational structure or subset of features, effectively presented to them as a structure of constrained variables. This process will only constitute some variables, values and musical objects while the rest will be discounted, effectively undetected, or allotted a more peripheral status. It affects our assumptions, opinions and expectations about what we think make up certain musical objects away from actual musical performances. Images of music are musical objects as they appear in the mind or between minds, that is, in culture: they are “imaginations” of music. They comprise internal and external differentiations, orderings of perceptions, aesthetic priorities, assumptions and expectations. Without images of music, all we encounter are disorganized sounds—actually, without the information processing capabilities that create these images for us, our brains would not really be functioning at all.
Images of music delimit what is thinkable as music, and, most importantly, thinkable through music. They can have a detrimental effect on the ability to appreciate and even imagine music that does not fit to their templates. Just as in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, what lies outside of them is cast as disruptive and apparently irrational, and often labeled “noise.” An inability or unwillingness to observe and comply with the implicit images regulating the perception and aesthetics of art and life in general is often classified as madness or put down to limited or altered mental capacity, or simply suffers from a lack of cultural capital.
Like thought, musical creativity works and is perceived in relation to these images of music and their blind spots, and when it manages to expand or supersede them it could be considered genuinely new, “modernist” perhaps. This musical creativity is not just the preserve of those areas of music-making considered traditionally creative (composition, improvisation and performance), but since all musicking generates and can potentially expand images, it is also something possible through music criticism, critical listening and repeat performance. It is only half the struggle, then, for composers to compose new music. Listening equates to composing in that both activities constitute musical thought, so without an appropriate way of listening—an appropriately adapted image of music—new music will not appear new, viable, or recognizable at all. New music demands new ways of listening. Indeed, the dichotomy is largely false because the two activities both constitute music: new music is new listening, and new listening is new music, even if it is “old” music with a fresh perspective.
The notion of an infinitely variable music-without-images can be seen as both the destination and the source of a modernist musicking, one that truly equates to thought. It cannot actually be manifested, since images are unavoidable if any information is to be gleaned from or through music at all. Yet musicking can hint at it, striving for richer images of music, images more suited to modern capacities and challenges. This process is achieved through, or at the very least in metaphorical parallel with, the development and usage of modern technologies and scientific discovery, and reflects modernity. Modernity is constantly “beyond” images and as such necessitates the creation of new images that better reflect the changed possibilities and structures of the modern world.
As with Deleuze’s Image of Thought, so with the sonocentric Image of Music, which all too readily associates what are limited images of music with an objective, sonified truth of discrete objects, thus listening with a minimum, or absence, of difference or thought. Musicking is not an encounter with these objects, but their ontological disruption, still less is it authenticated by some disavowal of the mediation of culture, “musical” or otherwise, by the bracketing off of life and the non-sonic in a realist search for sound-objects in themselves. It should be a continuous meditation on pure difference, before or instead of its division into sound and sounds. Music and listening should not be a museum full of given sonic objects, but a seething quantum foam that could give birth to a new dimension at any second. True listening, and true composing as well perhaps, is in not knowing what, or not knowing yet what sounds are or might be present, but nevertheless sensing change and the potential for change. This, one hopes, is modernist sound in the twenty-first century. It is not a sound.
Ultimately, it is the equation of music with thought that justifies the project of new music, of musical difference. If music and the world is in constant, continuous change, and needs to resist and replace limited, outmoded images of itself over any given time period, then music and thought alike should be at their most receptive to difference. We can endlessly pass images of music and of the world along the neural net unthinkingly, even images of new music with or without costume and manifesto in hand, or we can hope to improve and think anew. If music and thought are not just the purely aesthetic flickering of the mind but the sending of new information across neurons and across cultures and any living system, a technology of self (DeNora 2000) and of society, then we do not have to argue that music can be called upon to improve ourselves and our world simply because it provides fresh metaphors for it. Whatever its relation to soun
d, music is the very thinking of the world itself and of us as ourselves—it is not just us that creates music, it is also music that creates us.
I close, then, with the words of the composer Peter Ablinger: “Die Klänge sind nicht die Klänge! Sie sind da, um den Intellekt abzulenken und die Sinne zu besänftigen. Nicht einmal das Hören ist das Hören: Das Hören ist das, was mich selbst erschafft” (Ablinger 2002). “Sounds are not sounds! They are here to distract the intellect and to soothe the senses. Not once is hearing ‘hearing’: hearing is that which creates me.”
Works cited
Ablinger, P. (2002), Peter Ablinger website. Available online: http://ablinger.mur.at/ (accessed October 2, 2015).
Currie, J. R. (2012), Music and the Politics of Negation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994 [1968]), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. London: Continuum.
DeNora, T. (2000), “Music as a Technology of Self,” in Music in Everyday Life, 46–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harper, A. (2011), Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Harper, A. (2013), “A New Manifesto for New Music”, Gonzo (circus), January 11. Available online: http://www.gonzocircus.com/a-new-manifesto-for-new-music/ (accessed October 2, 2015).
Harper-Scott, J. P. E. (2012), The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction and William Walton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Russolo, L. (1986), The Art of Noises, trans. B. Brown. New York: Pendragon.
Shank, B. (2014), The Political Force of Musical Beauty. Durham: Duke University Press.
Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Varèse, E. and C. Wen-chung (1966), “The Liberation of Sound,” in Perspectives of New Music 5(1) (Autumn–Winter): 11–19.
15
Digital Sound, Thought
Aden Evens
Sound and event
An event is not a thing but a happening, something that unspools or streams. Events occur as part of and in the midst of other events, a ball of tangled string. What distinguishes an event is that it distinguishes itself, stands out from the flow, an eddy in the stream, a knot of fibrous threads. These are not images of discontinuity but of singularity; the eddy remains part of the stream’s flow, and a knot in a tree still conveys nutrients from roots to leaves and back. Though it stands apart, an event coalesces from out of its milieu, drawing itself together in strands of matter, motion, and thought. The event fits its context, bearing rich relations to antecedences and consequences, but it also stands over that context, asserting a coherence that exceeds its milieu. It arises as though already there, as though it had been waiting for the contingent alignment of its proper conditions. The event is determined as a resonance among numerous factors, a crossed threshold of imbalance that reconfigures its milieu. As it unwinds, the event coaxes or prods, calls to action or attention. Could we call this motion thought?
Thought or not, sound is always motion. To produce sound, to induce a vibration in some medium, requires an initial displacement. Something has to move from one place to another, and often back again, to induce a motion, an oscillation in the air (or other medium). The question is where this motion comes from, and where it goes. Thought sound is a motion of thought and sound; thought sound thinks. Or, thought sound is on the order of an event. It stands apart from but also carries with it its milieu, including its impetus and its potential, where it comes from and where it is going. To hear sound is to hear a motion, a motion of stories and promises, implications and expressions.
That there is no sound without motion establishes the priority of motion in sound. One hears first of all motion, displacement over time, oscillating air pressure serving as a medium of expression. Generated by displacement, sound carries that displacement with it; one hears spatial transposition and so hears in a sound that sound’s generation. Thought sound bears in its material the sono-spatial context of its propagation. A sound originating farther away typically has less high frequency content, as the short wavelengths of higher frequencies are more readily disrupted and absorbed by intervening surfaces. (Thus do mountain echoes have a hollow sonority: robbed of some high frequency content, their spectra emphasize mid-range and lower frequencies.) It is not only, therefore, the consequences of a sound on its environment that constitute thought in sound but the effects of the environment on the sound.
Even as it carries its origins with it, sound announces its destiny; its oscillations, a wave of rising and falling air pressure, make patterns, detectable as pitch, timbre, volume, duration, and other sonic phenomena, within and beyond thresholds of human perception. Compression of the air anticipates the subsequent rarefaction and vice versa; strung together, these oscillations establish larger patterns, creating and then resolving tensions heard as harmony, rhythm, vowel, and consonant. Of course this describes much music, especially Western music, but it holds true of any sound. Sound already announces where it is going, it promises its eventuality, holding—as implicated, not represented—the noise energy that will be drawn out and inflected to become thought.
Sound’s future also is its accidents, but accident in dialectical negotiation with the ideal or absolute: the implicated exists as a set of tensions, however harmonious, among the different frequency components of sound, which will draw noise into order to establish other tensions. The future of sound is heard in its tensions, that never fully resolve but only create more and less sympathetic resonance. Thought is satisfied, for a time, when sound offers the least tension, an octave or a sine wave, but even there lurks the next sound. Applause wipes away a tension too fully resolved, replacing it with a noise packed full of sonic energies at all frequencies, a sound that contains all the others; but the closer sound comes to noise, the less articulate it becomes, giving up pitch, rhythm, and timbre to approach that universal sound of noise.
To move from a vibration to a description of that vibration is to move in the direction of abstraction. Thought sound is an event, its motion happens over time, but time is nowhere represented in the sequence of numbers that constitute digital sound. Time gets siphoned off, removed during the distillation process that generates a digital representation of sound. It must be restored, added back in, when that representation once again becomes a hearable sound. In the standard case (for there are different ways of representing sound in the digital), the next number in the sequence is understood to represent the amplitude of the signal (or the pressure differential of the air) at the next tick of a digital clock. The clock, independent of the sequence of numbers representing any particular sound, determines how quickly to read through the list of numbers, and this sample rate is essential to the pitch of the generated sound. In this sense, pitch, too, is abstracted in digital representation, it becomes an assumption about the digital clock used to play back the sound.1
Stripped of its motion and its concrete relation to time, digital sound—if that refers to a representation of sound comprising a sequence of numbers—is not heard, at least not while it is digital. Made of bits, a digital representation of sound is discrete and precise: a list of integers representing the oscillating amplitude of a wave.2 What does a sequence of integers sound like? This sequence of numbers representing the rise and fall of a wave can be used to generate an electrical signal that rises and falls analogously, which in turn drives speakers that oscillate to generate at the surface of the speaker a variation in air pressure over time still analogous to the “wave” of integers. As this variation of air pressure over time moves through space away from the speaker and induces vibrations in an organ of hearing, say a tympanum, it can be heard; but then it is no longer discrete and precise, no longer digital.
We might take the term digital sound in a broader sense: to hear a digital sound would mean to hear a sound generated from or through a digital code. How, if at all, does dig
ital representation affect sound, and how does it affect sound thinking? Abstracting motion by encoding it as a sequence of numbers renders all sound in a common form, separates sound from its evental origin. Or perhaps the digital provides its own event of sonic production, ties sound to a digital origin and a generic (or numeric?) motion. How does digital content, a sequence of numbers that represent sound, become digital expression, sound heard or, possibly, sound thought?
The digital stratum
In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) imagine a performance by Professor Challenger, whose “dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program for pure computers” (57). The lecture ranges widely across fields, provoking much of the audience to walk out, but it appeals recurrently to a discourse about strata or layers, describing stratified organizations of parts of the world, where each stratum exhibits particular relationships among content and expression, form and substance. Strata “consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar aggregates” (40). At Deleuze and Guattari’s invitation, consider the topology of the digital stratum.3 Notably, the digital is bipolar. With abstraction as its chief technique and the bit as its central technology, the digital sets aside or defers generative difference in favor of the simple, abstract difference between 0 and 1, making the same difference—0 or 1—out of all difference. At this pole, the digital becomes a flat plane of equivocation, a pointillist sea of bits, the Ecumenon. Were this plane the only tendency of the digital, it would never come to mean anything, for meaning implies a difference beyond formality. The other pole of the digital connects this plane of equivocation with its outside, reaching toward the world in a sequence of discrete steps, stacked planes in analytic relations; we designate this expansive pole using the expression, n+1. The formula n+1, the increment, is not a fixed topological structure but a model for supplementation, an instruction to take a step (back); its form indicates an operation, a process rather than a stasis. The unit included in this formula signals its discreteness, while the heterogeneity of the addends points toward the implicit hierarchy of n+1: it is not a matter simply of adding one more of the same, but of dimensional augmentation, a leap up rather than a slide over. These two poles of digital topology, an inhibition and an expansion, themselves make no binary. The flat plane and the power to add a layer, these poles work across their difference to establish the digital’s power and define its limits.
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