Re: [-empyre-] Hearing and Listening / unreasaonable effectiveness of ritual
--empyre- soft-skinned space--The list has gone a bit quiet so, along with Paul, I too would like to respond to the question Johannes posed to me, and also add something in keeping with the topic this week. how Douglas Kahn might respond - is Earth Sound Earth Signal looking at political instrumentalizing of sonic energies and signal energies? The book covers quite a bit of territory with politics occurring frequently and at various levels, including instances of instrumentalization. It is an attempt to reconfigure given narratives of a number of historical back stories from the grassroots up, so it relies on speaking through innumerable original documents rather than gathering up existing glosses. The political animation follows Benjamin's dictum that there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism, and add that there are no transmissions in which signals are not mixed (p. 16). This disposition will be evident as you read, with several themes methodically developed in stages and interrelated over the course of the book. With respect to this week's theme, the book is my first attempt to address electronic music. It was always surprising to me over the years that many electronic musicians expressed their appreciation for my book Noise Water Meat (1999) since there was really nothing on electronic music in the book and I had nothing to say about it generally. By investigating it through energies rather than the parade of inventions/inventors, composers/performers, and cinema/television soundtracks through which the standard histories of electronic music are written, I believe there is way to engage electronic music (and related artistic practices) in a way amenable to nature and ecology...it's in the book. With a little distance from the normal motifs one can notice broad approaches toward technological control and to what is controlled, with 1920s electronic music and much that followed concerned with the former and 1960s (Mumma, Lucier, Oliveros, etc.) with the latter. And with this, to circle back to Johannes, there is a politics. It is not the only political dimension but one that relates to broader operations of politics. Douglas --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear moderator, dear all is it all right (given the asynchronous nature of this list) to still follow the invitation from last week that the weekend would open up a little breathing room for dialogue and reflection? (apologies if new topics, Feminism Confronts Audio Technology, have already entered the playing field and taken over). I was curious as to whether anyone thought my story about Xiansheng, posted on Sunday, was at all relevant to previous discussions on sound and transmission, collection and curating [culturally context-specific] - especially as I tried to evoke the rural and ritual context of the story of transmission of sound through the stomach, as well as proposing that culture specific ritual performance practices, even if considered politically and ideologically obsolete or in need of obsoletion, can be reinvented and fabricated to serve a particular role (and as far as gender in the transition and transmission was examined, and it was, Peter Ran Guangpei replied that the shamans in the village were male, performing the chants, so were the musicians improvising the percussion music; women led the agricultural labor force and controlled other matters of family and social practice; animals seemed to have privileged roles too). My post was addressed, implicitly, to Kevin deForest (his writing on 06/17 regarding): gather soundmaps and field recordings around the world has continued the trajectory from the 1960's pioneers of acoustic ecology. At the same time that it provides more opportunity to share eccentric or personal mappings of local place, I am interested in the exploration of cultures outside of the sound collector's, that is in effect their tourist snapshots of place, a familiar exoticizing occurs. ... And as much as the listening process can broken down into wavelengths, signal and noise, I think the interpretation of sound is importantly a culturally learned process So then I felt the discussion on vibrations could be illuminated listening to Paul Dolden's music from his Below the Walls of Jericho -- thinking of the story of the walls of Jericho [e.g. Joshua 6:1-27] and the sound that is said to have led to the crumbling, and the destruction of Jericho, and I consider the myth a very telling example of a political event (as we have continued to see them, Baghdad recently) here intertwined with a sound history event or a mythic allegory (walking around the fortress, sounding the trumpets) that I associated, on a late night watching a Hollywood film take on the Trojan Horse, following Homer's Iliad but compressing
Re: [-empyre-] No. 1, Day 5, Week 2
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks, Marcus, for the invitation, acting as moderator for your contributions, and thanks Nina and everyone else for contributing. Per Christoph and OOO, I think Jane Bennett does well on its pros and cons her essay on Harman and Morton. The important thing to remember is that Morton is not defined by OOO alone, in fact, he was brought to wide public attention for his eco-theory and for many that is how he is still best known. And OOO on a vernacular level (as a philosophy it's influence exceeded the usual demographic of discourse) it became an occasion and exercise for a radical reversal, not just of agency but in an ecological frame as well. This was in conjunction with Serres, Latour and Bennett, but perhaps it was the seeminly stark manner in which it was posed that served as an emblem for this field. In any event, it was quite important politically with respect to eco-theory, even if now it is being critiqued along the lines of more traditional philosophical debates. My concern for an expanded field of sound studies, as Marcus framed part of our discussion this week, has been formed by my study and association with experimentalism in the arts/music, both in its open-ended approach to its own means and contexts and its desire to address and connect with daily life, art and life, and a breadth of politics. You can see Jonathan Sterne in his introduction to The Sound Studies Reader and choice of entries being especially capacious in response, in my intuition, to an uneasy undercurrent of possible academization. It goes with the territory. Close scholarly studies, of course, shouldn't be confused with academic ones circling in tightly on ultimately irrelevant questions. So it's my opinion that it is the class of drives that opened sound studies initially that should be valued most. They should continue to operate in Marcus' expanded field of sound studies even if they exceed the sound barrier to get out into what's important, of which there's plenty to chose from. Again, thanks Marcus, Nina and empyre. Everyone, please feel free to contact me to discuss any of these issues. As you can see, I like to talk. Douglas --empyre- soft-skinned space-- So today's the last day of our exploration of energy and vibration as ways of thinking of an expanded field of sound studies ... and of our discussion of Douglas' new book Earth Sound Earth Signal. Thanks to Douglas and Nina for sharing their thoughts on these matters! I understand Douglas' concern that this kind of work will fall between the gaps -- but I think it also challenges us to develop the kinds of competences in things like basic physics that will help us to reconfigure disciplines -- and our own practices, whether they're built around history, art, theory etc. And, to put it in Latourian things, the invisible nature-cultural hybrids are all around us ... they are what constitutes our reality, which makes it all the more urgent that we refine our awareness of these matters. For myself I'm interested in the ways in which the arguments and developments which Douglas has given us allow us to think about popular and subcultural cultural practices. My father was an amateur shortwave radio enthusiast, and I did spend some of my childhood in West London watching him and listening in to the frequencies he was exploring. So somehow when those same frequencies appeared in early Cabaret Voltaire tracks, it didn't surprise me at all ... it was a familiar part of my sonic environment -- but therefore also one that I gave little thought to. Best Marcus On 2014-06-13, at 8:09 PM, Douglas Kahn wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Lots to chew on this morning. Only problem is that a cut in my finger got infected overnight is now quite painful. If I start swearing mid-sentence, you will know the reason...it's nothing personal. Marcus is correct. We have been talking more theoretically here, whereas the bulk of the book argues through the minutiae of historical event, with several instances reconfiguring larger narratives, one of those being how people heard natural in the telephone a decade before Hertz confirmed the existence of electromagnetic waves and two decades before Marconi. Thus, radio was heard before it was invented. This was based first of all on documents by Thomas Watson, Bell's assistant, that had never been cited by anyone before, and on trolling the anecdotal and technical depths of telegraph and telephone literature. So that complicates the history of radio not with the noises of nature to be eliminated but with electrical sounds that people found fascinating and pleasurable. It puts nature back among the origin stories of modern telecommunications, where nature has been written out in favor of genius inventors, patent disputes
[-empyre-] No. 1, Day 5, Week 2
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Lots to chew on this morning. Only problem is that a cut in my finger got infected overnight is now quite painful. If I start swearing mid-sentence, you will know the reason...it's nothing personal. Marcus is correct. We have been talking more theoretically here, whereas the bulk of the book argues through the minutiae of historical event, with several instances reconfiguring larger narratives, one of those being how people heard natural in the telephone a decade before Hertz confirmed the existence of electromagnetic waves and two decades before Marconi. Thus, radio was heard before it was invented. This was based first of all on documents by Thomas Watson, Bell's assistant, that had never been cited by anyone before, and on trolling the anecdotal and technical depths of telegraph and telephone literature. So that complicates the history of radio not with the noises of nature to be eliminated but with electrical sounds that people found fascinating and pleasurable. It puts nature back among the origin stories of modern telecommunications, where nature has been written out in favor of genius inventors, patent disputes, business models, etc. It shows telephone lines functioning as scientific instruments not just means of communication. And, taking one step back to Thoreau listening to nature's Aeolian sounds on telegraph lines (the Telegraph Harp), it requires a new term for hearing electromagnetic sounds on telephone (and telegraph lines...and wirelessly) lines: Aelectrosonic. If there is a small library on the Aeolian in literature, music and philosophy, then we should be hearing a plugged-in version too. That the Aeolian exists in nature and in instrumental (music/science) form is true too for the Aelectrosonic, starts messing with nature/technology distinctions. It directs attention to moments and mechanisms of transduction amid propagations of energy. It turns out that nature has been part of the technological circuit of telecommunications (earth returns, grounds, ionospheric reflection...), and that there are broad historical phases of nature going in and out of circuit. Then there are the earth scale issues. I worry that many of these observations will get lost in their demonstration; that someone who might be interested in historical media theory will chafe at reading about experimental musicians at the core; or that music scholars will find it uncomfortable listening to the beautiful glissandi of whistlers in the trenches of WWI; that theorists who often use artworks as peripheral illustrations of formulations founded elsewhere will find it odd that artists occupy places at the center; etc. Since finishing the book I've started to elaborate some ideas separately in papers. Next week, for instance, I'll present a paper at a conference on ecology and the humanities at Australian National University on what I meant by Icarus in reverse viz. global warming. BTW, I'd forgotten the whole Ludwig Klages connection with rauschen and To the Planetarium, although not sure where he dug up his phantoms and ancients. If I remember correctly, Norbert Bolz's little book on Benjamin had something about this and anthropological materialism. --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Sorry for the slow response here ... I gave a talk on Burroughs and shamanism at a workshop on General Idea, and yesterday was a long day! Yes, a lot of different threads. I was able to read further chunks of Earth Sound, Earth Signal en route yesterday ... a lot of what we've been discussing this week is about theory, conceptualizing things, but I urge people to read the book, because it's so rich in historical data, strange anecdotes, and portraits of relatively unknown but actually pretty major figures like Alvin Lucier's physics mentor Edmond Dewan. And I get the core point about the natural history of media, and the ways in which what gets called technology as a human endeavor, is necessarily embedded in these natural strata -- geophysical energy, electromagnetic forces, and so on. I think Nina's point about understanding the purposes of different measurement (or notation?) systems is important. It reminds me of something poet Chuck Stein said to me recently re. object oriented ontology and similar endeavors: that you have to understand what the purpose of particular arguments about ontology are. That there is no pure onto-logy outside of different practices, ways of approaching the issue. This I also take to be Badiou's position in Logics of World, as a (slight) corrective to his argument in Being and Event that ontology is mathematical. Even mathematical truth takes the form of different logics: algebra, geometry etc. My take on non-sensuous similarity (and The Doctrine of the Similar) can be found on pages 29-33 of In Praise of Copying. I wrote to a group of Benjamin scholars, including
Re: [-empyre-] vibration and movememt (cosmic scale)
in seeing animals in constellated stars, or kids imitating people, things and forces; in one of the most amazing (long) paragraphs in One-Way Street, To the PlanetariumI discuss this on page 77f. in ESES, sees an alienated/repressed union with the cosmos practiced ritually by the ancients sputtering along in the poetic rapture of starry nights but really snapping back with a vengeance on the killing fields of WWI. Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellors, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug into Mother Earth. The immense wooking of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale--that is, in the spirit of technology. There is so much to say about the piece and this passage, but for here we can note the presence of energies and a planetary scale notion of feminized Nature. It posits the First World War as an energetic manifestion at a global scale which would be punctuated at the end of the Second World War with perhaps the most important one, Hiroshima, since according to Michel Serres this was the first instance of a self-awareness of self-annihilation at a global scale shared now with global warming and ecological catastrophe, i.e., as in To the Planetarium, energy war and Mother Earth. But even more relevant, since Marcus this is where drone might be revisited, is that this ritual (war, planet, technology) engagement with the cosmos was conducted collectively through Rausch. This is one of those German words that doesn't fit into English very well, but from my understanding among its meanings/connotations are ecstatic trance (the way its translated in the English) and relatedly, intoxication, but also the sound of an onrush (on-rausch), like the white noise disorientation in breaking waves, with an undercurrent of rumbling or roar (roar you feel, but I think you also feel the hiss, with or without the mist). I could very well be wrong because I haven't tried to sort it out with any precision, but there might be some there there. One last thing. A qualification on the sensory, an artist like Robert Barry posits in his work that even though a person does not immediately sense something, say, ultrasound or radio waves, it does not mean that they are not there. When musicians like Pauline Oliveros produce overtones from subaudible fundamentals, even if they cannot be felt, the audible sounds do not necessarily abdicate their epiphenomenal relationship. In LaMonte Young's butterfly piece he stated that, sure, the butterfly makes a sound, just because we can't hear it does not mean it is not there. So there is a listening in along the lines of a reading into at work and at play. Douglas ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Douglas Kahn National Institute for Experimental Arts College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales, Sydney ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] vibration and movememt (cosmic scale)
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Senses are like the table of elements, a new one gets added every few years; except elements get heavier and senses get lighter. Regarding making the imperceptible perceptible. The term is often equated with technology when in fact trees and pinnae sonify wind. I am not that versed in the speculative realist writers you mention Marcus, except for Tim Morton who is a good friend of mine. We did a very interesting speaking tour through New Zealand, the two of us sitting on stage discussing things ecological, throwing it out to audience and taking it from there. These were audiences from broad walks of life and I'm not sure those who know Tim's published work know about what an excellent public intellectual he is in such settings. Tim and I differ on certain things. I agree that notions of nature are a liability in nature writing where you have to pull on a pair of hiking boots to be ecological, but I think nature has a powerful rhetorical function when discussing media, since media are imagined to have no nature (except with recent green media analyses although, again, I'm also interested in a radically positive approach). Energies are more easily relational (they are more than that, of course) than objects, but then again I think there is some confusion in a slip-and-slide between objects and things. I forget who had the Latourian litany that included electromagnetism among its objects, but it only makes sense if objects are philosophical entities and, since I am primarily a historian developing theory from the grassroots up, I leave philosophy on that level to philosophers. I did find the OOO discussions very helpful but only intersected them at a particular point. Someone may want to have a go at energy-oriented this or that, but it's not on the to-do list on my fridge. Douglas --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Yes, I was just trying to think about ways of talking about an expanded sensorium that would include the ways various non-human creatures sense the environment -- thermal sensing for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoception So, modes of sensing would leave open how many ways of sensing there are (I think Douglas said there are 23 now!). But then my interest was also in asking if thinking about an expanded sensorium covered the entire range of possibilities by which an organism might relate to/through vibration ... in other words is there something other than sensing? Is thinking a kind of sensing ... or not ...? Johannes, as to your question of what imperceptible forces might mean to us ... that's a huge issue. Douglas' book addresses that in terms of electromagnetism, which is often not perceptible (for example you don't hear your own brain waves, or others') but which is nonetheless there (you can measure or track it, and amplify it and/or transduce it so that it does become perceptible). So Douglas is documenting the work of artists such as Alvin Lucier, who make use of work in physics, and technologies that render imperceptible forces perceptible (Lucier uses EEG technologies that can track electrical activity aka brainwaves in the brain, and works out a performative mode of transducing those waves, turning them into audible sounds). I suspect both Douglas and I are referring to recent theoretical work by the speculative realist writers (for example Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier) who make an anti-postmodern argument that there really is something there ... but that it's not phenomenologically accessible. So then, you have a variety of artists who are finding ways of transducing and (re)presenting in different ways what would otherwise be unpresentable (sounds too deep to hear, brain waves, quantum events etc.). But then the question arises: are they presenting the unpresentable (which would seem by definition impossible) or ... what? Is it a kind of model or metaphor that suggests what cant be presented? On 2014-06-13, at 2:55 PM, Nina Eidsheim wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi, Johannes! Nina could you please expand on that past part, what modes of sensing do you not subscribe to? I simply meant that if modes of sensing refers to human range of sensing, I am not sure where I stand in regards to that. (But, it does seem limiting.) When I wrote that yesterday, I wrote it thinking I was in agreement with Marcus. Is that right, Marcus, or perhaps I am misreading you? I think it was actually Marcus who first brought up the phrase, modes of sensing, in this conversation. Would you mind sharing more about what that mean to you? Nina On Jun 13, 2014, at 7:58 AM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all thanks for the thoughtful response,
Re: [-empyre-] vibration and movement
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Johannes: I read your second message where you mentioned your first message that, for some reason (perhaps time zone issues) appeared far down on my list of emails. So, sorry if it seemed I was not responsive. First, let me say that when I said I wished to stay away from the body when examining Lucier's Music for Solo Performer, it was in the context of attempting to historically elaborate in my book Earth Sound Earth Signal, I believe for the first time systematically, cultural engagments along the electromagnetic spectrum. In the book, I do discuss a number of factors informing MfSP, including both Dewan and Lucier's notions of where bodies come into play. I do not stay away from the body in principle, see the Meat part of Noise Water Meat, which includes the section on Artaud, per your invocation of Artaud, or the more recent essay that I mentioned in an earlier message here about interoception of American male artists in scientific and quasi-scientific spaces drifting from the material culture of the Cold War (starting with Cage's anechoic chamber, which was constructed as part of the war effort). You're right, there is plenty written by now on sound in all is manifestations. However, my book is on the energetic trade between acoustics/sound (mechanics) and electromagnetism, which is a new approach to sound as well as an opening up to other (possible) discourses on energy generally. Douglas --empyre- soft-skinned space-- thanks to Nina, Marcus and Douglas for these very fascinating thoughts opening the second week, and it struck me, listening to (well, reading) Douglas trying to stay away from the body examining Lucier's Music for Solo Performer, that I have never really seen the Lucier performance except in photos, with the electrodes attached to the head, and in re-performances of Lucier's piece by younger artists and then I was intensely aware of, or drawn to, the strangely immobile body of a performer concentrating (or letting go, relaxing) : the sound generated by the brainwaves, inexplicably from a conventional schema or territory of assumption (as Nina asks) or value or even identification � unless we go to the other end and listen to the percussion instruments, and their membranal movement, but what moves the movement? how do you worry about waves (not being physicist or engineer or pyschoacoustic scholar).? And speaking from a perspective of theatre/dance and performance, which would interest me to ask you all about, as well as from a perspective of social choreographies or soundings (Julian Henrique's work on cultural sound systems and the operators of the speaker system collectively producing the Jamaican music and its kinetic frequency phenomena -- thus also the dancing and the community), how do you know, indeed, as Nina implies so poignantly, how to measure a gesture from a gesture, how to understand or know affect or react to it when you listen or move to sound vibrations? The energies in performance -- this might not be the subject that Douglas wanted to talk about here, and my knowledge of the physics of sound is minimal, yet Douglas mentions opening out sound to energy. But how does the snake measure the vibrations it feels on the earth (the snake is evoked by Antonin Artaud when he addresses vibrational energies and transmissions through/across and along the while body/organism), only along the length of the body? what lies outside? Or how do sounds or music (and higher frequencies) enter inside, via hearing, into the kind of most strangely perplexing affect, body-eros, and perceptional confusion of memories, for example when I started to write, here, and listened to a falsetto (castrato voice), right here in my room (online version of Othon Mataragas Ernesto Tomasini - Impermanence), then switched over to hear Tomasini talk excitedly about flamboyant gay performers re-owning the lost/suppressed male high voice. I found this very encouraging and exciting; and against suppression forgetting, I realize there is increasing work done out there, scholarship on sounding histories and localities (and artworks such as Teri Rueb's sound walks), well I came across a book by Emily Thompson, titled The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), and I figured she must have gone on to search out the old (radio) archives in New York or Chicago, maybe like Douglas did --- where do you go for these layers of older sound and (no longer existing voices)? And how to measure them? regards Johannes Birringer dap-lab London http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap + ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] No. 1, Day 4, Week 2
the conversation--I'll pick up on a few. Measurement: The question of measurement is fascinating, fraught, and, a question I think of as offering me more insights into the person/organization etc. who desires to pin down an object through measurements than learning something about what has been measured. From identifying something through the question what is a sound (the sets of values and skills developed in order to identify physical energy as sound with certain characteristics) to a given that constitutes coherence between sounds so that we may understand a series of sound to form a gesture or phrase, and, furthermore, keeping those phrases separate so that, for example, the individually recognized phrases in relationship form the fugue form; to measuring the energy and metaphorically representing that energy through visual graphs/waves etc. (Tara Rogers has offered interesting feminist critique of this). To me, the question of sound, or any other ways of understanding physical energy (including dance gestures , Johannes), often boils down to: what needs do these practices of measurements and subsequent identifications/namings fulfill? For whom does infusing a given system of measurement with authority and holding a given system of measurement in place hold value? The Body: With Douglas, I see the necessity to focus a historical inquiry (to for example include or not include the body). And, with Marcus' reminder of our Cornell Society of the Humanities visit to the Lab of Ornithology, I am reminded of the anthropomorphic undertone with which the concept of the body and epistemology through sensation is often infused. Does paying attention to the body means attending to the vibration as I feel the vibrations through the flesh and bones as it stands on the airport floor? Would an inquiry into the vibration as it pulses through a speck of skin fallen from my leg onto the floor also constitute attending to the body? If not, does size matter? Would attending to the vibrations of my severed leg laying on the floor constitute attending to the body? Or, does only a given material's seeming continuous material connection to what I think of as the object that is body constitute thinking about the body? The latter position, then, to address Marc us' question, does come down to modes of sensing. At this point, I am not ready to subscribe to that. And, I doubt whether all of the artists with which Douglas deals in Earth Sound would subscribe to that as well. But, perhaps I am completely off base? Nina On Jun 12, 2014, at 7:07 AM, Marcus Boon mb...@yorku.ca wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Re. non-sensuous similarity ... that was something that I was trying to puzzle out in my book on copying ... what Benjamin means by that phrase ... or even where he got it from! Apparently there are similar notions in Medieval Christian mysticism, non-sensuous sensuousness in Nicolas of Cusa. But thinking about it in terms of forces operating below the level of the sensible is pretty helpful, and it opens inquiry up to thinking about energy states, forces etc. It's also something that comes up in Taussig's work. In the Defacement book, he's fascinated by the ways in which a defaced object arouses such intense affective states, and often results in the destruction of both the object, and the environment around, and threats against the producer of the defaced object. He talks about defacement as a liberation of energy that is somehow contained within the object -- and which in some sense constitutes its objecthood for us. It's almost as tho what we see as a particular o bj ect is a configuration of energy -- but what kind of model of energy does that imply? Douglas Kahn National Institute for Experimental Arts College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales, Sydney ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] No. 2 Day 2 Week 2: Sonic Paths
do we believe their naming or inability to name the sound tells us about that person? In other words, thinking about vibration in the form of sound seems to push into the territory of assumption about what can be known, and value and virtue around people who hold such knowledge. The assumption that we can identify a given vibration as a knowable sound, also presumes that there is something stable, or, a prior, to an iteration of vibration towards which the given iteration of vibration is compared. Moreover, thinking about sound as knowable, presumes the listener not only hears and recognizes the sound, but, prior to that assessment, holds knowledge about possible sound designations. The knowledge about these sound designations is used to subsequently compare and recognize sounds. Finally, what does thinking about a certain category of vibration as sound, presumes vis-�-vis listening, or perception thereof, more broadly? To me, it is here the body--already mentioned by Douglas and Marcus--is inextricably linked to a category such as sound. Who whom or to what (whether human, animal, object, or instrument of measurement, or other) does that energetic or vibrational field unfold as *sound*? More importantly, what is gained, or, what (political, social, ethical, etc.) work can be carried out by understanding energetic or vibrational field as sound? Nina On Jun 10, 2014, at 6:28 AM, Marcus Boon mb...@yorku.ca wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think that notion of energy and its relation to the arts is an important one. I was just browsing through the empyre archive and reading Alex Galloway's comments about the Excommunication book, and his interest in finding ways of talking about media that aren't predicated on communication or networks in their various reified forms. Earth Sound, Earth Signal offers a start at finding vocabularies and practices for thinking about and engaging with energy qua energy. But it's true that energy can be an incredibly vague word, when used by artists or other non-scientists. And then there's the various New Age framings of energy, which the book acknowledges, while insisting on some kind of concrete practice of engagement with energy, however esoteric the theory. I wonder how the work of someone like Wilhelm Reich (who's mentioned a couple of times in ESER) fits into the argument: he has a theory of universal energy (the orgone), various practices for mobilizing it (including the infamous cloud busters that were attempts to manipulate geophysical energies) ... and an influence on the arts that is probably still uncharted (I think of Burroughs with his orgone accumulator ...). Doug mentioned that he mostly bracketed the issue of the body, as a complex and subtle field of energetic forces. I'm definitely interested in the body in my own work, because the kinds of manipulation of energy, vibration, and sound that happen say in a dancehall, are very much tuned to the capabilities or possibilities of the human body. Julian Henriques' Sonic Bodies is a marvellous attempt to fully catalog what that force field of the dancehall is composed of. I'd also say that it's difficult to avoid the issue of psychic energy when talking about subcultural scenes which are often concerned with what Goodman calls affective mobilization. The emphasis in Doug's book on transduction is very helpful to me ... I'm interested in what constitutes affective transduction. I know that folks like Brian Massumi have done some elegant work on this ... but I'm increasingly drawn to thinking it through in terms of psychoanalysis, and the ways in which the psyche is structured to accept, reject, seek to repeat or seek to block internal and external energy. But of course it gets tricky because the status of energy, or libido, within psychoanalysis today is pretty shaky. On 2014-06-09, at 8:00 PM, Douglas Kahn wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello everyone. Thanks to Tim and Renate, and thanks to Marcus for inviting Nina and myself to empyre. It's now Tuesday morning here in Sydney; it's nice to wake up to this discussion. My book Earth Sound Earth Signal took many years to research and write. Like the genesis of books for many people, I was not planning to write it; instead it grew out of trying to understand a few works by the composer Alvin Lucier and the artist Joyce Hinterding that involved natural radio. Investigating natural radio turned out to be the natural place to start unpacking the relationship between two energies, sound and electromagnetism, especially the historical trade between the two starting in 19th C. telecommunications. Natural radio, it turned out, was heard on telephone lines nearly two decades before Marconi's wireless telegraphy device and about a decade before Hertz
Re: [-empyre-] No. 2 Day 2 Week 2: Sonic Paths
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Let's try that again. Nina. Your book sounds wonderful; what's the ETA? On the face, it seems like a wise move to couch sound in vibration since it would be more inclusive of not only inaudible and audible acoustics, but also the mechanics/movement operating across bodies and spaces at first sensory and physical remove from sound. It seems to retune and temper sound to lived and performed situations. It also questions how close sound should be attached to listening. Hillel Schwartz in Making Noise and other writings has long made it clear how sound, its kith and kin change with respect to historical, cultural and physiological contexts. The presumption of the human audible range rolls off the tongue. I like too what you say about where a sound stops and starts. It reminds me both of James Tenney's notion of the event structure of the klang in Meta-Hodos as an analytical and compositional construct. On a more prosaic level, it reminds me of the atoms/atmos issue of a cloud, how many clouds in a cluster, overcast, overcast at night. Marcus, are there drone fugues? A contrapuntal overcast? Where the sound in sound studies stops and starts is a much more fraught question. I was in Europe recently where a musicologist decided that musicology was the best discipline to decide what was canonical and what was not in sound art as a whole. Not that discourses in sound art make that much reference to sound studies in any case, but the inheritant presumption of the musicologist (buy me a drink and I'll name names) was precious. I don't necessarily think that the vibration in my early tripartite formulation of vibration, inscription, transmission is awfully applicable to the way you're using the term. When I brought that up in 1992 in the introduction to the collection Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde it was a rhetorical reading of figures of sound present in the early-20th century and influential on modernist, late-modernist and experimental practices subsequently. It was mostly in literature and representational forms of synaesthesia (physiologically, synaesthesia exists, its generalization among the arts and aesthetics is as cultural as it gets). It was very developed and common in occult and spiritist materials, where it played the odd role of a mystical rationalism flourishing from the latter-half of the 19th century while the putatively rational sciences and mathematics grew further from experience. The heavy use of integers is a good sign, so that's where music often comes in. Its rhetorical standing is written in the way music extended to the structure of the cosmos in adherence to Pythagorean and neo-Pythagorean ideals, and even in the retreat (that I mention in the book) to an instrinsic mathematics and cosmogenesis in superstring theory that has Brian Greene and others effusive about violins, cellos and the Aeolian existing at an exceedingly tiny scale. No cosmic brass or percussion, it seems, just strings. My daughter is a classical clarinetist, so this too disturbs me. I would like her to be recognized as part of the cosmos. Her partner is a cellist but that is beside the point. Douglas ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] No. 3, Day 2, Week 2
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- If you look at the expanse of Alvin's work you will see that his the body does not play an overly important role. This does not necessarily include the corporeal rigors that performers must go through to play his music. Invoking his stuttering in the text of I am sitting in a room is an obvious example, and much more candid than the passive relationship that Cage had to his body invoked in the specialized scientific space of the anechoic chamber, where it was last refuge for environmental sound in a theoretical free-field where space was not locatable, especially in a body let alone the socious of bodies. It's no secret that the Western art music tradition is not immediately equated with trance-n-dance. However, the role that Alvin's body or brainwaves plays in the overall scheme of things is limited. I referred to it most importantly because it was his first venture into what he called natural electromagnetic sound, a class of sound that he understood to be occurring with a Cagean imperative for more new sounds. It turns out that his instincts were correct on that count. But the fact that he deployed the speakers in Music for Solo Performer according to spatial precepts that included the landscape of New England and the space of a football stadium, and that his next work in natural electromagnetic sound was at earth scale, would suggest that his body was a waystation. It certainly was a waystation in my book. My great privilege, besides being a student of Alvin's, was to have interviewed Edmond Dewan, the physcist who offered Alvin many of his key ideas (brainwaves, whistlers, Amar Bose's demonstration that transformed into I am sitting in a room). Edmond too was focused, in my estimation proportionally, on human consciousness as but one feature of a larger spehere of physical operations. So, perhaps the melding that you heard/felt/experienced/thought about/wrote about of inner and outer in Alvin's performance was the product of a weighting in favor of the outer. The default is with expression; that realization informed Cage post-1948. Cage's mistake was to equate jazz/improvisation with self-expression whereas many of its most interesting practitioners are in it precisley to abdicate self to the inheritance, to the musical group, to the audience, to the environment and cosmos. It's laid out in Anthony Braxton's Tri-Axium writings among many other places. It is the sonosphere of Pauline Oliveros. Anecdotally, the proportions play themselves out differently in the different places in the world. From my limited experience, when I presented the material that went into Earth Sound Earth Signal on different continents, questions about Alvin's brainwaves were more intense in nations with lesser remnants of civil society. In the U.S., the body that could host brainwaves becomes the reconstruction site of a familiar individualism, preferably consumptive (of things, HBO series, innovation, etc.). I often had trouble directing people to the main topic. Whereas in Australia and Europe, where civil society is more extant, audiences have questioned the material in the proportion in which it was presented. This is where the politics arise. The Nero-like antropocentrism of an immediate default to human energies while the world burns; despite the abdication of a traditionally expressive self among improvising violinists, it seems to correlate to an eroded civil society, i.e., to a lack of expressiveness within a state rather than purchases, fandoms, allegiances, and debts to an economy. In Australia there is a broader consensus about the environmental crisis than in the U.S. because of a persistance of civil society (despite Tony Abbott's recent attempts to abolish both). So I wonder about the ecological politics, in certain settings, of formulations of the body. Michel Serres has pointed out the oxymoronic state of ecological politics since polis derives from the social behaviors within a city state (elevated in the fortress of the Acropolis). It seems to me that bodies, if they are to live within cities or anywhere else, now require a politics that embody the finitude of the planet as the last fortress. What does that sound like? Douglas --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I'm intrigued too by the role of Lucier in Douglas' book -- and how Lucier thinks about matters of body and psyche in relation to his work. Did you get a sense of this at all when you were studying with him, Douglas? I was lucky enough to hear/see/feel a performance of Music for Solo Performer in NYC a while ago. I think what remains with me of the piece is the sense of one interior (that of a brain, or a psyche) somehow projected onto an exterior, which forms another interior (that of the resonant performance space). The confusion of the different inners and outers was really uncanny ... and it also triggered a
[-empyre-] No. 1, Day 3, Week 2
O (the names are clue!) what you're hearing is a music built around energy surges, vibratory matrixes ... it's energy that is reve aled by sustaining tones. You stop focusing on the shifting of pitches and melody, your sense of time is altered because a lot of the time there are no drums and thus no overdetermination of pitch or rhythm. You tune into much faster and slower periodicities, often so fast or slow that at first you're not aware of them at all. It's about attention ... La Monte said tuning is a function of time. The unpresentable aspects of sound and vibration become a model for the unpresentable as such. But I also come back to Nina's point that it's about modes of sensing, about immersion and strategies for exploring an immersive unknown. And in a way I think we're just at the beginning of thinking about these matters ... as you noted, Douglas, most of the work discussed in your book relates to scientific knowledge as it stood in the late 19th C. Douglas Kahn National Institute for Experimental Arts College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales, Sydney ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Day 2 Week 2: Sonic Paths
to repeat or seek to block internal and external energy. But of course it gets tricky because the status of energy, or libido, within psychoanalysis today is pretty shaky. On 2014-06-09, at 8:00 PM, Douglas Kahn wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello everyone. Thanks to Tim and Renate, and thanks to Marcus for inviting Nina and myself to empyre. It's now Tuesday morning here in Sydney; it's nice to wake up to this discussion. My book Earth Sound Earth Signal took many years to research and write. Like the genesis of books for many people, I was not planning to write it; instead it grew out of trying to understand a few works by the composer Alvin Lucier and the artist Joyce Hinterding that involved natural radio. Investigating natural radio turned out to be the natural place to start unpacking the relationship between two energies, sound and electromagnetism, especially the historical trade between the two starting in 19th C. telecommunications. Natural radio, it turned out, was heard on telephone lines nearly two decades before Marconi's wireless telegraphy device and about a decade before Hertz verified the existence of electromagnetic waves. Thus, the catch phrase: radio was heard before it was invented. Sound is considered first of all a physical energy in the major classical physics branch of mechanics, electromagnetism as the other; with their relations falling within moments and means of transduction (which I break down into two very general categories in-degree and in-kind). So the expansion of sound studies that Marcus mentions is based upon the generalization of sound among other energies. It was a dual task layed out methodologically by trying to understand what artists do on the terms upon which they work (rather than through received canonical or theoretical lenses) and going wherever the sound leads. The expansion of sound studies was how sound studies got going in the first place. It is also the mode of operation in much of the avant-garde and experimental arts that I study; they have in the past been thought to be reduced acts of transgression when they can be seen more generatively as proposing or enacting possibility. Those two opening ups coupled with what Michel Serres says about collectivist reciprocation (too many scientists, he says, take knowledge from nature and give nothing back) is what animates my own work. In this sense, I've boiled it down to: John Cage opened music to sound; it's time to open sound to energy. Of course, it has always been open; only our analyses have been lacking. In theory and philosophy when energy is discussed, it is very rarely specified; it's more of a short hand and broad brush. I hope we can think about that in our discussion of vibration. My first recourse now is wonder what differnt energies may be interacting. In Earth Sound Earth Signal I kept away from the body for a good reason. I only dipped below Alvin Lucier's scalp for his brainwaves and traced the transduction down tympan alley past the cilia to the ion channels. I avoided the body and got out as quickly as I could. The body works on a very complex and different set of energies than radio and other locations along the electromagnetic spectrum. No one had ever tried to introduce the aesthetics and politics along the e-m spectrum (in 1994 Hugh Aitken had proposed a SHOT-style project to do so, but he died and no one took up the task), so I had enough work to do without multiplying the level of complication. But I am starting to think about it now. The discourse of energy is alive and well among artists, but what for instance does a musician or actor mean when they talk about the energy in the room? The other direction is to relate these energies with the ecological realities facing the planet. If we understand global media systems to be energetic ones (and not, say, merely cartographic/inscriptive networks), then how might that relate to that other energy issue happening in the solar-terrestrial environment. Again, I think there are concrete ways to proceed. Douglas Douglas Kahn Professor of Media and Innovation Australia Research Council Fellow National Institute for Experimental Arts College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales, Sydney --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks to Tim and Renate for inviting us to participate in empyre this week! When Tim and Renate asked me what directions my own interest in sound studies were taking, I thought immediately about Douglas Kahn's new book Earth Sound, Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, which U. California published a few months ago. I've been interested in expanded ideas of sound
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2: Sonic Paths
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello everyone. Thanks to Tim and Renate, and thanks to Marcus for inviting Nina and myself to empyre. It's now Tuesday morning here in Sydney; it's nice to wake up to this discussion. My book Earth Sound Earth Signal took many years to research and write. Like the genesis of books for many people, I was not planning to write it; instead it grew out of trying to understand a few works by the composer Alvin Lucier and the artist Joyce Hinterding that involved natural radio. Investigating natural radio turned out to be the natural place to start unpacking the relationship between two energies, sound and electromagnetism, especially the historical trade between the two starting in 19th C. telecommunications. Natural radio, it turned out, was heard on telephone lines nearly two decades before Marconi's wireless telegraphy device and about a decade before Hertz verified the existence of electromagnetic waves. Thus, the catch phrase: radio was heard before it was invented. Sound is considered first of all a physical energy in the major classical physics branch of mechanics, electromagnetism as the other; with their relations falling within moments and means of transduction (which I break down into two very general categories in-degree and in-kind). So the expansion of sound studies that Marcus mentions is based upon the generalization of sound among other energies. It was a dual task layed out methodologically by trying to understand what artists do on the terms upon which they work (rather than through received canonical or theoretical lenses) and going wherever the sound leads. The expansion of sound studies was how sound studies got going in the first place. It is also the mode of operation in much of the avant-garde and experimental arts that I study; they have in the past been thought to be reduced acts of transgression when they can be seen more generatively as proposing or enacting possibility. Those two opening ups coupled with what Michel Serres says about collectivist reciprocation (too many scientists, he says, take knowledge from nature and give nothing back) is what animates my own work. In this sense, I've boiled it down to: John Cage opened music to sound; it's time to open sound to energy. Of course, it has always been open; only our analyses have been lacking. In theory and philosophy when energy is discussed, it is very rarely specified; it's more of a short hand and broad brush. I hope we can think about that in our discussion of vibration. My first recourse now is wonder what differnt energies may be interacting. In Earth Sound Earth Signal I kept away from the body for a good reason. I only dipped below Alvin Lucier's scalp for his brainwaves and traced the transduction down tympan alley past the cilia to the ion channels. I avoided the body and got out as quickly as I could. The body works on a very complex and different set of energies than radio and other locations along the electromagnetic spectrum. No one had ever tried to introduce the aesthetics and politics along the e-m spectrum (in 1994 Hugh Aitken had proposed a SHOT-style project to do so, but he died and no one took up the task), so I had enough work to do without multiplying the level of complication. But I am starting to think about it now. The discourse of energy is alive and well among artists, but what for instance does a musician or actor mean when they talk about the energy in the room? The other direction is to relate these energies with the ecological realities facing the planet. If we understand global media systems to be energetic ones (and not, say, merely cartographic/inscriptive networks), then how might that relate to that other energy issue happening in the solar-terrestrial environment. Again, I think there are concrete ways to proceed. Douglas Douglas Kahn Professor of Media and Innovation Australia Research Council Fellow National Institute for Experimental Arts College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales, Sydney --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks to Tim and Renate for inviting us to participate in empyre this week! When Tim and Renate asked me what directions my own interest in sound studies were taking, I thought immediately about Douglas Kahn's new book Earth Sound, Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, which U. California published a few months ago. I've been interested in expanded ideas of sound studies for a while, particularly in thinking about vibration as it relates to popular and experimental music scenes -- partly under the influence of Steve Goodman and his fascinating book Sonic Warfare, which MIT published a few years ago. I've been talking with Nina Eidsheim for several years now, and was struck by her work on vibration and singing/performance (which will be published in her forthcoming book Sensing Sound). So I
