Unbound



Notes on Sound Unbound

 

 

Overall reactions: 

The themes I am most intrigued by and that I continue to see repeated are: (1) The relationship of music to capitalism, and art to capitalism, thus following (2) The potential for a revitalized folk culture in digital media (3) The relationship between memory and music, especially the spectre of nostalgia that is haunting media theory all over (4) Following from these, the tied relationship between copyright (“greedy” capitalism – but a musician’s gotta’ eat, right?) and remix (free-spirited folkiness and sharing) and how that works with our collective memory – in other words, where is this music coming from? Is it biological, memetic, genetic, shared, specific… and of course, the age-old question: where are we headed?

Read: Antonin Artaud, “The Alchemical Theater,” 1938

 

Williams

“as human beings we communicate with each other and with the greater universe through sound vibration. it is, thus, the essence of our collective being. all sounds reverberate with meaning. every sound vibration has an effect, and every sound connected with every word we speak, in every syllable, is connected to its eternal meaning, its eternal reverbration.” (Williams, 21)

I like this because it sutures up that Sausserian split between sound and meaning. Here we have them linked together. And the universe has a buzz.

“our present reality is pre-sent, dictated by what we asked for previously.” (Williams 23) – relation to Zizek’s notion of signs from the future. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOTufvP9-6U

Lethem

“For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises ficiton’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always where it ought to reside.” (31)Lethem is writing this sarcastically, though, it seems – yet I think there is something to this. Philosophy becomes fiction when it is too steeped in the “frivolous Now” – yet philosophy must be applied. But over and over. Yet we can re-apply fiction. This is problematic. What is the diff. between fiction and philosophy? Is there not philosophy in fiction and vis versa?

“born backwards” is something like being always already interpollated in a sort of Althusserian sense, but there is no mention of ideology here. (31)

“We’re surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them.” No, this is ridiculous. We must filter out the garbage or we would be buried. (32)

Lethem’s understanding of the world is wrong. “I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade, and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode.” (38) But these are not the businesses that are thriving, at least in the UP and I suspet in much of America, where, for example, the craft brewery down on the corner run by the old staple family who has been in the area for five generations is getting more business than the bar at Applebee’s, and there is that sense of community that people are after, a new authentic experience… yet it still seems like a replication of something once had or now gone, and thus it is the opposite of what they want: it is a purely inauthentic experience

My general response to Lethem: okay, can art really survive in capitalism? Or is this why we’re in a rut? (Think about Lanier’s comments, here, too) (Lethem 35) – is the copyright even conceivable in communism? Can we have communal art in a capitalist economy? etc. etc.

Sterling

Yes, the Inca quipu is quite beautiful and metaphorical and maybe they had a more musical and tactile language, sure… OR is it just the postmodern tradition to hate English? Like, “oh English is an imperial language, it is awful and violent” but perhaps it is actually quite a beautiful language. It’s uncool to like English in academia. But it is a musical language, certainly, it stretches when we need it to bend, wave, and move like music. (77)

“I suspect the proper attitude—one that more and more people will share in the coming millenium—is a kind of Olympian pity. We are as gods to our mere mortal media—we kill them for sport.” – re: technology… Yet we glorify the GameBoy and its culture, for example. We have a very hard time letting go of our creations. We are incredibly nostalgic when it comes to media. Perhaps this is why we remix. (81)

Or is the control over our technology only an illusion. Perhaps Sterling here is making a very ideological statement, he has been interpollated into the dominant view of us-over-technology, some sort of hierarchical construction.

“Exactly how attached can I become to this machine? Just how much of an emotional investment can I make in my beloved three-thousand-dollar hamster?” the problem is, I think, that people are making attachments to the spaces outside the machine… the machine becomes a portal to the Facebook, which is where they become addicted to the constant social feedback, swirling in perpetual lingual nothingness and text-blocks…. (81)

OR it is that this is the sickness of capitalism and technology, that we are so unattached that our lust for the latest gadget can be exploited. I go to BestBuy or something and the salesperson says “well you really should upgrade to the BlueFish 3.2 instead of the 3.1… it has twice as many megaherpz and it’s a lot shinier” and we all go “oh, okay!”

Dick Hebidge

“annihilation of boredom” … one should never be bored when one is alive. It is beautiful to be alive. But we don’t need Zen for that. (85)

Jordan, Paul D. Miller

101 – digitality and folk culture

RE: remix… “…this kind of unsolicited collaboration challenges some long-held notions of intellectual property, and of an artist’s unique affiliation with his or her own output. But at the same time, it brings back the idea of a shared folk culture, where creative expression is the property of the community at larage and can be shared for everyone’s benefit. Digital technology may be a route that reconnects us to aspects of our tribal roots.” (101)

Maybe aspects, but not wholly, no… we are re-inventing our culture to be non-folk, to be an anti-folk… we must be incredibly careful not to trick ourselves that we are somehow becoming more grounded, Earthy, or responsible through the misuse of technology. But through a decisive, meaningful application of technology? Perhaps…

A new digital folk modality – folk music is incredibly popular right now, no doubt because of its nostalgic properties. But where Gilian Welch re-imagines Dust Bowl era struggles on the farmyard, we lose sight of ourselves. Where is our culture? The non-folk? The to-be folk? Or is our independent culture our new folk culture, the anything-that-is-not-mass-media?

Oliveros

“Musicianship escalates with the aid of technology.” (121)

No. I think immediately of Skrillex. And there is this fantastic photograph of him playing Solitaire while he is supposedly performing. The jackass. Composing in the current state of technology rips all the life from music. Now, composing through technology might be different. Or recording technology.

Also, improvised music still has many parameters. The player moves within a certain scale in a certain key. With the correct skill set and memory, it is like mashing buttons in a video game. One cannot play a wrong note. Thus, new melodies are merely incidental of a pre-formed memory of the fretboard or keyboard etc. and often the musician has a huge grab-bag of pre-written riffs that are fitted into the improvisational sequence. Thus, guitarists are often berated for “noodling” – which is more an accurate word for the process than true improvisation.

Now, Oliveros shines for me here:

“Music and especially improvised music is not a game of chess—improvisation, especially free improvisation, could definitely represent another challenge to machine intelligence. It won’t be the silicon linearity of intensive calculation that makes improvisation wonderful. It is the nonlinear carbon chaos, the unpredictable turns of chance permutation, the meatiness, the warmth, the simple, profound humanity of beings that brings presence and wonder to music.” (124)

Yes, the meatiness!

(125) You see, though, a musician should not know “everything” about his craft… there must be room for destruction and error. No one should have perfect pitch. Music is a process of discovery, not divinely imagining a score and scribbling it out. I imagine that even Beethoven, composing in deafness, was probably doing so through relative pitch.

Again, Oliveros shines: “Performance of traditional music is rewarded and encouraged rather than acts of creation. Performance and creativity both could be rewarded and encouraged.” (127)

This is a beautiful statement and I believe it holds true to not only music pedagogy but also to pedagogy in general. This is the sorry state of American education. We are asked to memorize facts but never to create new information, never to break beyond the boundaries of knowledge and challenge what is already here.

Rimbaud

132 – I think media theory, in general, is haunted by nostalgia.

“Similarly I believe that buildings and spaces also retain a particular memory, a sense of time or place.” (132)

Sure, isn’t it pretty to think so? But this is ridiculous, of course. Sounds like a Toni Morrision novel, Beloved, the opening line: “ 124 was spiteful.”

Yes, I am often, at times, romantic (Romantic?), too – but there is a place for this, and it is, I think, fiction, not philosophy. It is in art, not theory.

Then again, Nietzsche wrote with such passion and intensity. It was more like literature than a treatise. And in some cases this is more meaningful.

 Reynolds 

Relatedly: “In that respect, there’s a lot more to be learned from fiction than theory” – Reynolds quoting Fuller, I think on 179

 Winner 

Atari and Raymond Scott patents (201)

 DeLanda 

memetics and digitality (219)

 Jordan 

spontaneity and truth (252)

and Jordan again here attends to this idea (problem) of folk in a digital world.

Folk and Luddism

“Ironically, the codified folk style was itself the product of technology.” Yet, why should it be ironic to celebrate the sun, the stars through technology? Often we better enjoy the earth through the decisive (and often limited) use of technology… I see the point being made, here, though. But it’s a sad tale.

It’s almost as though the only way to celebrate nature anymore is through a capitalist act. Art must be capital, because we are so exploited, our time is so short… we are commodifying nature through the Bon Iver and Fleet Fox genre snatching up Grammy awards (253)

“As DJ Spooky has suggested, folk music no longer comes from an acoustic guitar, but rather from a hard drive.” (254)

I have a very hard time digesting this, and would be interested in finding this source. I am not sure where I stand, here, but it feels quite violent.

Independent artists use the Internet to gain notoriety, but it is ultimately all regulated by industry, advertising… but like with the phenomenon of Justin Beiber, that was OUR fault! We put him there. We watched the video, shared the video. Or was it the fact that he was picked up by the talent agent? Could it have happened without the relative virality?

I don’t even like this idea of viral videos, because it’s not like they’re just out there, on the Net, reproducing… WE, the users of the Internet, decide what we like and what is passed on. Or are we no longer in control? Has the Internet become a non-democratic place? One can purchase “views” on YouTube, for a fairly steep price…

Iyer

Yes, music is situated and embodied, sure, but it is not exclusively a subjective experience. Sound waves have objective properties that can be measured, analyzed, etc. – and music is often a communal, shared activity, where multiple individuals participate, or dance, the solid beat, the beat that connects them into participation

Often in music, unlike the novel, it is the specific information which “sticks in the head” – such as a melody that we hum obsessively, almost neurotically. Yet, with the novel it is more of the affect, the image, the general impression that is left with the reader. Can music, thus, transmit specific information more effectively somehow?

embodiment in general, here...

Roumain

“aleatoric” (358) – I have simply seen few uses of this term and am interested… nothing much of note here, however

Lanier

“You can have a population of wonderful authentic starving musicians living RIGHT THERE in the middle of a huge population of potential fans seeking authenticity in music, a frustrated population of potential fans seeking authenticity in music, a frustrated population that dutifully pays monthly cable and online bills without finding what they seek, and yet there doesn’t seem to be a way to connect the two groups together.”

Exactly. The infrastructure does not exist to support the recent saturation of independent musicians self-publishing their work. Some sites like BandCamp and Soundcloud provide nice outlets, but the venues aren’t there. The record companies aren’t there to support everyone. More people are musicians than there is room in capitalism to pay them. But perhaps this is the wrong way to look at it. Perhaps we should all be creating our own songs, writing our own novels, without expectation of pay. Why should I be paid for doing what I love? Is there something pretentious, here?

“…relationship of music to capitalism”