Okay, so I can see that people are taking in. We will start today's session with a short announcement. I've been writing out in an email last week. A lot of you have been asking about the final essay. And last time we met, last Sunday, I said that you had to do a written paper of three to four thousand words that's still an option but i added the other option of an audio essay of around 15 to 20 minutes um so if you want to do that i've like listed the requirements for for that um in that email that i sent out if you didn't receive the email just write me an email
then i'll resend it um if you do the audio essay option then um there's also an option for it to be broadcast through the Berlin based radio station, Catmere Radio, which is a community driven radio, and I'll just post a link in the chat if you didn't see it in the mail. That will not influence your marks if you choose to go for that option, but see it as an opportunity to get out into ether. Professor. With that, I will very much like to welcome Christoph Cox. Christoph Cox is a philosopher, critic and curator of visual and sonic art. He's a professor of
philosophy, dean of the faculty and vice president of academic affairs at Hampshire College, where he teaches modern and contemporary philosophy and art theory. Cox is also a member of the graduate committee of at the center for curatorial studies at bart college he is the author of sonic flux sound art and physics from 2018 and nature naturalism and interpretation from 1999 and the co-editor of realism materialism art from 2015 and the very much influential audio culture readings in modern music from 2004 and a revised version in 2017. He is the recipient of an art writers grant from Creative Capital Warhol Foundation.
Iron Cox is editor at large at Cabinet Magazine. His writings have appeared in October Art Forum, Journal of History of Philosophy, The Wire, Journal of Visual Culture, Organized Sound, The Review of Metaphysics, and elsewhere. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, The Kitchen, The Artists Institute, Context Art Miami, Neil Langton Arts, G Fine Art Gallery, and other venues. Today, Christoph Cox will give a lecture titled Out of Earshot, Episodes in the History of Unsound. In this talk, he offers a nonlinear tour through selected episodes in the history of sound and unsound from the early universe
through the practices of sonic artists today. Drawing on current cosmology, ancient Greek and indian metaphysics 19th century philosophy and phonography and key works in the history of sound art he explores the idea of a perennial sonic flux that precedes and exceeds human existence but is nonetheless graspable through reason and sensation and charted by science philosophy and art He will show how pioneering sound artists recaptured, recapituated the history of unsound and anticipated recent debates about rationalism and materialism.
Christoph Cox will conclude with speculations on the ethics and politics suggested by the conception of cosmic unsound. on sound. There will be sound examples so as always you might consider using headphones and after the lecture we will have a discussion based on student presentations of around 10 minutes each by today it's by Howe, Zenobio and Maria and after that we'll have the five minutes responses by Alejandra, Yussi, Nikita, Orlando, Sebastian, Vincent, and Nima. And by that, Christoph, welcome. Thanks very much. Thanks for being here, and thanks, Jakob, for the invitation.
Looks like a fantastic series. I love the group of people that's preceded me, and it looks like some fantastic people ahead, too. So I want to begin with, at the top of an essay, sometimes you find an epigraph, right? So I'm going to have an epigraph, but this epigraph is going to be a short video clip. So let me just share my screen here. And I'll just just the briefest hint. But so this is from this is from a film. Let me get rid of this. Just this is from a film made by a friend of mine, Jake McGinsky, Jake McGinsky and Neil Young, his partner in this film. And it's a film about Milford Graves, who's a percussionist,
but who is more broadly a sort of theorist of vibration. So just this is about a two minute clip. The objective of music was to train you to understand motion oscillations. This is a membrane, which some people call a drum skin, but we also have a membrane inside. This is more circular, and the air drum inside has a more kind of oval shape. But the principles of vibration is very similar. This part of the skin goes up, this part of the skin goes down, it sinks in, so it's like
It has this very warp type of vibration because of the surface. The cosmos, everything we know, plants, they're all in motion. Everything is moving in all these different kind of directions here. They'll have effect on all of the kind of, how all of these neutrinos and everything, you know how much is going through our body right now. We got so much cosmic energy going through us. The drama is supposed to be very related to the intake of this cosmic energy because we definitely have the facilities and there's a lot of things we don't hear. And that's the movement of molecular substances or elements in the ear that's constantly moving
about. I fully believe that there's other substances that are constantly impinging on that membrane that's got to vibrate. And the body's ready to receive that. And that's the loop that we have with the cosmos. You've got to constantly have that loop. Nature's so cool, we need you to complete that loop, because I feel like there's all these big loops going all over the planets. We should be vibrating and oscillating those creative ears in the brain that can feed us new nerve pathways, growth of new pathways, so we can get in touch with a lot of information that, from a cosmic point, is out there. So we're not fine-tuning ourselves to be able to pick it up. So all the thoughts and concepts and creativity is coming through us.
That's how it works. We need some drastic changes because you know what? The planet is changing. The vibration of the planet has changed. Everybody talking about the weather, more earthquakes. I said, because the motion has changed the vibration. Musicians, we are supposed to hear that. So the music has got to be relevant to that. You know, we got to have some relevant vibrations. Okay. All right. So that, let me. Okay. So in an exhibition held at the Japan Society in 2005, the celebrated conceptual
photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto presented five of his own photographs alongside an assortment of three-dimensional artifacts he'd collected over the years. A 12th century Shinto deity, a prehistoric stone phallus, a mask from the Kamakura period, and other paintings, sculptures, textiles. Some of these artifacts date as far back as 10,000 BCE, but all were crafted by human hands. However, Sugimoto also exhibited another set of objects from his collections, fossils and trilobites, ammonites, and other extinct plant and animal species. Among them, for example, was this fossil, featuring an assortment of crinoids dating back 340 million years, about 338 million years before the emergence of the first proto-humans.
The human-made artifacts in Sugimoto's collection register the struggle between decay and preservation, the effort to rescue works of art and craft from the ravages of entropic time. The fossils mark a different relationship to time and have a special importance for Sugimoto, who refers to them as the oldest form of art. Indeed for Sugimoto, fossils are a form of pre-photography. Just as a photograph is the causal index of an object on a light-sensitive surface, a fossil is a physical imprint of a form in geological material. Both the photograph and the fossil freeze a moment in time, or rather they provide traces, spatial inscriptions that allow us to mark the passage of time. Fossils then are what Sugimoto calls pre-photography time recording
devices. Earlier in his career, Sugimoto had photographed dioramas reimagining undersea scenes from the Devonian period. These scenes had of course been reconstructed from fossil evidence. Sugimoto's images of these dioramas then were photographs of photographs twice removed. They prompted him to see all photography as a process of making photographs out of the present, thus projecting a future in which photos provide evidence of human life. Photography is just a half century older than phonography or audio recording, another form of indexical registration. Sugimoto's conceptual practice prompts one to ask, might there be a phonographic fossils too? Whatever their mechanical similarities, photography and phonography differ in crucial aspects.
Not only do they engage different senses, they also have different relationships to time. Photographs fix a temporal instant in an immediately visible image, visible image, while audio recordings capture an extended temporal process in a format that requires a machine to decode it. Even so, paleontologists have uncovered what they take to be sonic fossils. In 2012, for example, a team of scientists reconstructed the sound of a 165 million year old katydid by comparing the wing structure evident in a fossil of this Jurassic insect with that of its living descendant the modern day katie did just quick uh recording of this similarly in 2016. similarly in 2016 paleontologists discovered the fossilized
remains of a duck-like creature that lived 66 million years ago allowing them to imagine or or rather to oralize the soundscape of the Cretaceous period. Accurately speaking, however, these examples are less akin to Sugimoto's photo fossils than they are to the dioramas he photographed, their reconstructions based on fossil evidence. But a more direct and profound sonic fossil does exist, an indexical trace with the spatial and temporal magnitude far more vast than of any other fossil in the cosmos. I'm referring to the baryonic acoustic oscillations evident in the distribution of galaxies in the universe and in temperature fluctuations apparent in the cosmic microwave background. These patterns were fixed around 380,000 years
after the Big Bang, so just a little over than 13.8 billion years ago. What does it mean to say that these visible and spatial features of the universe are acoustic or phonographic fossils? In the early universe, space was filled up with a photon baryon plasma, an intensely hot soup in which photons or light were coupled with baryonic or ordinary matter. This soup wasn't fully uniform, but instead exhibited slight differences in material density. Each denser region gravitationally drew matter toward it, particularly the much heavier dark matter that was part of the soup in addition to ordinary baryonic matter. But at the same time, scattering photons exerted an outward pressure. And since light and matter were coupled with one another,
the baryons were pulled outward as well, resulting in acoustic waves. These pressure waves pushed out in all directions, creating spheres or shells of oscillating matter. As the universe expanded, these oscillating shells grew bigger, but the expanding universe also cooled. Around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was cool enough for electrons to be captured by nuclei, generating the first atoms and transforming the plasma into a gas. This process also decoupled matter from light and thus halted the acoustic waves. The radii of the shells were thus fixed at the distance at which sound traveled at this point in the history of the universe, what cosmologists call the sound horizon. This distance is evident in the density patterns in space, in the distribution and distance between galaxies.
The arrangement and density distribution of galaxies in the universe then forms a sound fossil, the spatial trace of the most primordial of acoustic processes. Another such fossil is the cosmic microwave background, which cosmologists call relic radiation. The peaks and troughs in this distribution of electromagnetic radiation are like the distribution of galaxies, indexical records of the primordial sound of the universe. In 2004, Mark Whittle, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, used this cosmic microwave background, or CMB, to generate an acoustic portrait of the early universe from the Big Bang until recombination, the point at which light and matter decoupled and these acoustic fossils were formed. fossils were formed. Like any fossil, the CMB is a snapshot of a moment in time, a spatial rather
than a temporal distribution. But using computer models to extrapolate back to earlier moments in the history of the universe, Whittle arrived at this five-second portrait in which pitch is transposed up to 50 octaves. So I'll just play this briefly. I'm sorry. Whittle projects that at 380,000 years, the volume of this cosmic sound would have been tolerable to human beings, about 110 decibels, more or less the amplitude of sound at a club or a rock concert. So this video then shows the evolving sound spectrum
across the first 400,000 years. And you can sort of follow the passage of time and the changing waveform. In the sixth century BCE on the island of Samos off the coast of present day Turkey, the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras also posited a version of cosmic sound. The story goes that when Pythagoras was out for a walk, he passed a blacksmith's forge and was captivated by the concord and discord of the clanging hammers. He began experimenting first with hammers and then with strings and weights before settling on the simplest of the musical instruments, the monochord, a long string stretched across a movable bridge
with a resonating box. Observing the oscillations of the string, Pythagoras came to discern a set of acoustic intervals that were expressible in arithmetic relations. For Pythagoras, as for latter-day rationalists, this was a remarkable discovery. The discovery that when examined in its basic constituents, the messy and mutable sensible world was fundamentally based on the clarity and eternity of mathematics. For the ancient Greeks, the sun, moon, stars, and planets were the very image of eternity. And Pythagoras came to see a correlation between the movements of the celestial spheres and the ratios and harmonies he had discovered in music. As Aristotle put it, since the Pythagoreans saw that the modifications and the ratios of the musical scales expressible in numbers. Since then all other things seemed in their whole nature to be modeled on
numbers and numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of nature. They supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things and the whole of heaven to be a musical scale and a number. The movements of the celestial spheres constituted a cosmic music, a musica universalis, or a harmony of the spheres. This harmony was intelligible but inaudible, or at least it was was inaudible to most human beings. Pythagoras himself is said to have been able to hear it. As the Neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry tells it, he himself used to listen to the harmonious music of the universe since he perceived the overall harmony of the spheres and of the stars that move within them, which we do not hear because our nature is limited. Other Pythagoreans remarked that the music of the spheres
is inaudible to us for the same reason that blacksmiths don't hear the beating of their hammers. that is because it constitutes the background noise of the universe in which we are bathed and to which we're accustomed. The Pythagorean conception of musica universalis would go on to be developed by later European thinkers, notably the medieval Roman philosopher Boethius and the early modern German astronomer, Johannes Kepler. Yet a conceptually related doctrine forms the basis of classical Indian metaphysics and musicology. The foundational texts of Indian philosophy, Vedas and Upanishads assert a fundamental connection between sound and the absolute nature of reality embodied in the syllable om. Indeed, one of the principal Upanishads,
the Mandukya, is simply a gloss on its first line which reads, om, this syllable is the whole world. Musical scholars in the Vedic tradition later came to distinguish between two types of sound or vibration. Ahatanada is what we call music or struck sound, the sound produced when a physical object is plucked or bowed. This sound is impermanent, a vibration in the air that begins and ends. This audible music, however, is premised on a deeper and more universal conception of sound, anahatanada, or unstruck sound, the vibration of the ether. It's unstruck because it's the perennial cosmic vibration of the universe that precedes and exceeds any human or terrestrial activity. Like the Pythagorean music of the spheres, it's ordinarily inaudible,
but forms the principle for all physical or audible manifestation. Through meditation and intense contemplation of music, the Indian tradition teaches, one can ascend to a cosmic perspective and gain access to this unstruck sound. In each of these theories, we find a basic tension, the tension between a rationalist or mystical worldview and a profoundly materialist one. On the one hand, sound or vibration is said to be fundamentally inaudible, capable of apprehension only by way of reason in mathematics or by meditation and contemplation. On the other hand, both the Pythagorean and the Vedic traditions posit the notion of a perennial sonic flux that forms the basic background of our experience. It's inaudible not because
it's purely conceptual, but because it's constant and ubiquitous. This same tension appears in the work of the great German rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Throughout his corpus, Leibniz repeatedly returns to a particular example, the example of a man who lives near a mill or a waterfall. Such a man, he notes, no longer distinctly hears the sounds made by the mill or waterfall, even though they're ever present. Now, Leibniz maintains that such a person does in fact register these sounds, but only unconsciously as background, as something ordinary and not singular. And that's true of white noise generally, Leibniz's favorite example of which is the noise of the sea. He writes, each soul knows the infinite, knows all, but confusedly. It's like walking on the seashore
and hearing the great noise of the sea. I hear the particular noises of each wave, of which the whole noise is composed, but without distinguishing them. But confused perceptions are the result of impressions that the whole universe makes upon us. It's the same for each monad or each individual. So when I walk along the seashore, my perception of the great noise of the sea is clear. In other words, it's fully and powerfully audible. But it's also confused since I hear this sound as a mass and fail to distinguish its elements, the individual waves which remain obscure. Nevertheless, I must in some sense hear the individual waves, otherwise I couldn't hear the aggregate. So the The sound of each individual wave must be distinct from me, though in an unconscious and hence obscure sense.
Such unconscious perceptions have what Leibniz calls a virtual existence. They determine conscious perception but are generally not present to it. This virtual field has for Leibniz a truly cosmic significance. Each of the minute perceptions, as he calls them, that unconsciously determine conscious perception is itself the effect of causes that ramify out to infinity. Each individual wave is the result of a multitude of forces, the speed and the direction of the wind, air temperature and pressure, the temperature and viscosity of the water, and so on. As a result, each conscious perception is the local registration of the entire state of the universe at any given moment. So in the passage I quoted a moment ago, Leibniz conclude that each individual or monad knows the infinite, knows all, albeit confusedly, that is virtually.
To return to Leibniz's sonic examples, what we call white noise contains in principle all frequencies of sonic energy in a sort of dilated state such that no one element comes to the fore or draws our attention. If we accept Leibniz's argument, we hear each of these sound waves, past and present, but we hear them confusedly. Indeed like the man who lives near a water mill, this sound remains background to us and constitutes what we call silence. Only the singularity of a signal, speech or music, for example, stands out against this background contracts it and renders it clear and noticeable. Confronted with the noise of the world then, Leibniz argued that our perception of this noise is grounded in a vast swarm of elements that don't tend to reach conscious thought, forming a virtual background consisting of unconscious differentials. Leibniz's account of music is structurally similar, but here his rationalist
tendencies come to the fore. He argued that the music we hear is made possible by mathematical differentials that again are not consciously perceived but exist virtually and apprehended unconsciously thus like Pythagoras Leibniz could reduce music essentially to mathematics music he writes consists only in the harmonies of numbers and in a calculation that we're not aware of but which the soul nonetheless carries out a calculation according to the beats or vibrations of sounding bodies which are encountered at encountered at certain intervals These various strands of world thought Greek, Indian, and German came together in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer from music sound and unsound have a paramount significance. One of the few German philosophers who were deeply influenced by the classics of Indian
literature and thought, Schopenhauer considered his metaphysics to be a synthesis of Plato, Kant, and the Upanishads. Like Pythagoras, the Indian musical tradition, and Leibniz, Schopenhauer drew an important distinction between the manifest or sensuous world and the more fundamental metaphysical composition of reality. Following Kant, he distinguished between a phenomenal and a noumenal world. The world as its present to our experience and the world as it is in and of itself. So the world present to our experience, what he calls the world as representation, and Vorstellung is a world of objects in space and time that are connected to one another through relations of cause and effect.
Now for Kant, the noumenal world is unavailable to us. It can't be experienced or known, but can only be thought as a posit or a correlate. Kant thought that if what we experience is a representation, there must be something that's represented. But here Schopenhauer profoundly departs from Kant. For Schopenhauer, the way the world really is, is fully and immediately present to us. It's not present as something we know, something external to us that we apprehend, but rather it's present to us as something we are, as the force of desire and action that animates us from within. So for example, I experience you as something external to me, an object among other objects, but I experienced myself from the inside as it were, as a subject that can animate my body from within, right? I can move my hands, but I can't move yours.
I don't have, I have this animating force from within me that with regard to external objects are, I don't have that relationship. It's that latter idea that Schopenhauer calls the world as will and distinguishes from the world as representation. Now for Schopenhauer, everything in the world has this dual aspect. Everything is both will and representation. But it's important to note that will for Schopenhauer is just an analogy. He's not an animist who thinks that everything's alive or akin to human beings. Rather, the term will is used to cover all the forces in nature, gravity, electricity, magnetism, organic growth, animal desire, human knowing and willing, and so on. Indeed, for Schopenhauer, there's only one will
that manifests itself differently in different phenomena, not only in different natural forms, rocks, trees, squirrels, humans, et cetera, but in different individuals. And so my experience of myself as will connects me with everything in nature. What flows through me as will and desire is identical to what flows through everything else in the universe. Schopenhauer sees this will as a blind, irrational force and an endless striving without aim, end, or satisfaction. And it's for this reason that philosophy that Schopenhauer's philosophy is deeply pessimistic. In the end, he thinks, we're all just hosts for a viral force that temporarily employs us as its vehicles. Now what does anything, when does any of this have to do with sound or unsound? Well, Schopenhauer values art insofar as it allows us to become spectators who view the world solely
as a representation, as something to be grasped from without and at a distance. And here he's clearly thinking of the visual and the literary arts, you know, painting, sculpture, theater, poetry, architecture, etc. Insofar as art allows us to do this, it gives us some respite, some relief from the world of will and desire. But music, Schopenhauer thought, is entirely different. Music doesn't represent anything. It's not visible, tangible, or durable. And here he's thinking of so-called absolute music, right, purely instrumental music. Music doesn't represent anything. Rather, it simply consists of tones in relations of tension, concord, and discord with one another. Whereas the visual and literary arts are the ideal figures of representation, music for Schopenhauer directly models the turmoil and striving of the will.
will. But Schopenhauer goes further. It's not that music represents the will, rather, music is the direct expression of the will. He writes, music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it's not a copy of appearance, or more exactly, of the will's adequate objectivity, but is directly a copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing in itself to every appearance. Accordingly, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will. Indeed he goes on, music is also quite independent of the apparent world, positively ignores it, and to a certain extent could still exist even if there were no world at all, which can't be said of the other arts. Like the other
philosophers we've considered then, Schopenhauer sees music or sound, sees in music or sound the sensuous presentation of an absolute reality of cosmic significance. Yet in Schopenhauer's view, this absolute reality is not rational or apprehended primarily by means of reasons or concepts. Rather, it's profoundly physical and material, something we enter into through desire and action, which connect us to all of nature in its perpetual becoming. Schopenhauer's view resonates with a Greek philosophical tradition that distinguishes between two different types of life, what the the Greeks called bios and zoe. Some of you may know this from Giorgio Agamben, but the version I'm presenting here is, you know, differs from Agamben's in significant ways.
In his study of the Dionysus myth, the philologist Karl Karenyi clarifies that in Greek thought, bios designates the characteristic traits of a specified life, the outlines that distinguish one living thing from another. In other words, bios is this or that specific individual lives or dies, me for example, or you. By contrast, Zoe designates life in general without further characterization and experience without limitations. Zoe is the life that passes through individuals but is irreducible to them, what Karenja calls the thread upon which every individual bios is strung like a bead and which in contrast to bios can be conceived only as endless. The Greeks associated this impersonal and pre-individual life with the god Dionysus, the god of intoxication,
music, and ecstatic dance, who was celebrated by the Greeks in collective rituals that featured theatrical competitions among tragic playwrights. This was the subject of Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, which drew on Schopenhauer's conception of art, but developed it in a far more materialist direction. The ostensible topic of this book is fairly narrow, the historical origins of tragic drama in ancient Greece, but the book ranges far more widely than this, offering a full-scale metaphysics in which music and sound play a central role. The book proposes that ancient Greek art was motivated by two creative impulses named after the gods that inspired them and that they honored. The Apollonian impulse is evident in the visual or
plastic arts which present discrete and enduring spatial objects. The Dionysian impulse is evident in the dynamic fluidity of music which models the movement of time in its creation and destruction of forms. Beyond the literary and historical analysis of Greek drama, this pair of terms forms the basis of a metaphysics. For Nietzsche, these Apollonian and Dionysian impulses are rooted in nature itself. They are, he says, art impulses of nature. The Apollonian names the discrete beings we encounter in the world. The Dionysian names the perpetual flow of becoming that ceaselessly generates and annihilates these entities. In a characteristic move, Nietzsche refuses to distinguish between nature and culture, folding the latter into the former. For Nietzsche,
human artistic production is derived from a deeper source of creativity, the generative power of nature itself which Nietzsche calls the Ur-Artist of the world. The human creation of paintings, sculptures, films, photographs, musical work, sound installations, theatrical productions, and the like are latter-day manifestations of the geological, physical, chemical, and biological forces that generate mesas and emeralds, peonies and peacocks. For a current account of what Nietzsche calls the Dionysian, one could do no better than to turn to Manuel de Landa, the Mexican philosopher whom in his magisterial book A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History writes, reality is a single matter energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated stuff simply enriching the reservoir of non-linear dynamics and non-linear
combinatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes. So how does this connect with music and sound? Again, Dionysus is associated with music and intoxication, with Zoe, the pre-personal, anonymous life that passes through individual forms, and with the ceaseless creation and destruction characteristic of the natural world. In the Greek and Nietzschean imagination, music models the temporal evanescent flow, the restless tensions and dynamic becoming of the world. It consists not of enduring objects or things, but of processes and continuous variation. Throughout human history and across cultures, music has been associated with ecstatic states that de-individuate the subject and merge it into a collectivity. This loss of self is figured in Dionysian myths that involve what the Greeks
called spara- spara-gmos, the ritual dismemberment of an animal that reenacts the dismemberment of Dionysus himself in various myths. Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche gives music and sound tremendous metaphysical significance. In contrast to some of the other figures and traditions we've considered, this is not the rationalist vision of planetary harmonies, mathematical ratios, or a pre-given rational order, rather it's a deeply naturalist vision of a material becoming generated through difference, disharmony, and dissonance. Five years after Nietzsche published his book on music and the art impulses of nature, Thomas Edison inaugurated a technological revolution that fundamentally altered how sound was understood and transformed the sonic arts. Prior to Edison,
all sound was ephemeral, emerging from and descending back into unsound. The invention of phonography in 1877 enabled sound to be captured reproduced and repeated ad infinitum it transformed a process into a into an object an inert thing that required a machine to animate it this aspect of phonography sort of a parenthetical remark here this aspect of phonography is nicely captured in Christian Marclay's uh the sound of silence a photograph of Simon and Garfunkel's 1964 uh single the sounds of silence so the image renders the song as a mute object that paradoxically captures the silence to which the song alludes, but that its playback ceaselessly interrupts. In one respect, Edison's invention captured and domesticated sound,
yet in another sense it opened an entirely new dimension of sound for aesthetic appreciation. Previous modes of sound recording were able to capture only articulate sound, speech, and music through forms of written notation. The phonograph, however, registered sounds indiscriminately, putting all sounds on the same level. It registers not only human speech, but any sound whatever, irrespective of its source, human, animal, plant, inorganic, mechanical, whatever. As such, it made possible something beyond music, something that today we call sound art, the exploration of sound in its totality. Sound in its totality is the sonic flux, which phonography submitted to aesthetic attention and appreciation. As Edison knew well, phonography allowed the dead to be sonically
resurrected. Describing his invention to a newspaper reporter in 1878, Edison wrote, this tongueless, toothless instrument without larynx or pharynx, dumb voiceless matter, nevertheless mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words, and centuries after you've crumbled into dust will repeat again and again to a generation that could never know you every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you choose to whisper against its thin iron diaphragm. Indeed late in his life Edison became obsessed with communicating with the dead via an invention he called the spirit phone. If this is ever accomplished, if communication with the dead is ever accomplished, he said, it will be accomplished not by any occult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means such as are employed by so-called mediums, but by scientific methods.
Against theories that take speech, music, and sound to be spiritual or immaterial, Edison's inventions revealed it to be a simply physical and technological fact, nothing other than the vibrations and tracings of material objects. The Pythagoreans celebrated music as mathematical ratios and intervals, fractions made up of integers, octaves, fifths, forth, and so on. By contrast, Edison's phonograph simply recorded frequencies, vibrations per second. As Friedrich Kittler puts it, phonography inaugurated a fundamental shift from a logic to a physics of sound, from chords, intervals, music, and harmony, to a pure acoustics able to account for the noise of the world in its entirety.
I noted that phonography is a key condition of possibility for sound art insofar as it undermines the hierarchy of articulate sound over noise, causing music and speech to recede into the sonic flux, the background hubbub of worldly sound. Of the several origins of sound art, one is surely John Cage's infamous composition, four minutes and 33 seconds. Now I'm aware that this is an all too familiar example, but I wanna examine it a little bit. When it's not considered to be a sort of impish joke, Cage's famous composition is often considered to be purely conceptual, a purely conceptual proposition. The reduction of music to zero or to almost nothing. Treated as purely conceptual, we can believe that we get it by simply describing it.
Oh yeah, the composition consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. But Cage considered the piece otherwise, and I think we should too. Cage asks us first and foremost, not to conceive this silence, but to perceive it, to listen to it. and to do so for its full duration. This, I think, is a key episode in the history of unsound. What the piece offers is an auditory opening onto background noise, a temporal window or frame that shapes our listening. So for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, Caves asks us to listen to the world around us in this particular location, here and now. Doing so collapses the distinctions between sounds. It invites us not to prioritize some sounds or sources over any others, but simply to listen to the perennial sonic flux of the world as it manifests itself to us.
It also collapses the distinctions between subject and object. The sound of the body, heartbeats, blood flow, tinnitus, if you have it, like me, form part of the same sonic field as passing cars, ticking clocks, humming fluorescent lights, barking dogs, music, rain, wind, human speech, etc. So if there's a conceptual component in the piece, it comes in the understanding that this particular temporal and material slice of the sonic flux is just that. It's part of a vast whole. It's the Leibnizian insight that a particular sonic field or soundscape I apprehend presents a zone of distinctness within a sonic flux that's spatially and temporally infinite and that remains for any of us obscure out of earshot, out of earshot, available to us conceptually but not centrally. And as such, 433 is a form
of sonic sampling. Though 433 is often called the silent piece, and Cage is often thought as the composer of silence, right, his most famous book is probably the book called Silence, he repeatedly says that there's no such thing as silence. So for Cage, silence equals noise, equals the sonic flux of the universe. 433 is perhaps the the most non-technological composition in the history of music and sound art. It requires literally nothing to no no nothing to perform it, no material to perform it except I suppose a body. Though it was initially performed in a concert hall by a pianist reading a score, later versions of the score and Cage's comments about it make clear that it could be performed by anyone, anywhere, for any length of time. Nonetheless,
the piece has an important relationship to 19th to the 20th century musical technologies. In a 1937 text, it's quite an early text in Cage's career, Cage wrote, wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 55 miles per hour, static between the stations, rain we want to capture and control these sounds the text goes on to describe how one might use phonographs to do this now cage initially conceived the piece four minutes and 33 seconds in 1948 as an intervention into muzak right so muzak is that corporation which provided background music to department stores restaurants hotels and factories as such cages uh the the
length of the piece the initial length of the piece which he originally called silent prayer was proposed to be the length of a typical Muzak piece, which is about three and a half or four minutes long. This length in turn was determined by the length of the 78 rpm vinyl records. A 10-inch disc could hold about three minutes and a 12-inch disc could hold about four and a half minutes. So the piece is also connected to radio. Its immediate predecessor, that is the piece just before this composition, was a piece titled Imaginary Landscape Number Four, which was scored for 12 radios. And I have a sound clip from this, but we can hear it later on in the discussion if we want to go back to it. But I'll just describe it. So for Cage, the radio was a tool of
indeterminacy, requiring that the composer and performer submit themselves to whatever happened to be floating through the airwaves at the time. So connecting these two pieces, 4 minutes and 33 seconds and imaginary landscape number four, gives us a clearer sense of the connections between sound and unsound in Cage's work. Now we're constantly bathed in radio waves which silently carry signals through the air, signals that can be made audible by radios, TVs, and cell phones that download them from the ether. Now these radio waves form an ongoing acoustic flow that we tap into only periodically and 433 operates in exactly this kind of radiophonic manner. For a brief window in time it attunes us to the infinite and infinite and continuously unfolding domain of worldly sound.
As Cage often remarked, music is continuous, only listening is intermittent, extending the term music to the entire sonic flux in such a way as to undermine any notion of music as an intentional or human act. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Canadian composer R. Murray Schaeffer pursued Cager's logic and began to treat the world as what he called a vast music, a vast musical composition, which is unfolding around us ceaselessly. Schaeffer called this the world soundscape, right? So Schaeffer is the person who invented this term, the soundscape, describing it as a macrocosmic flow of sound composed of more limited soundscapes or acoustic environments. His aims were simultaneously artistic and ethical, conceiving the world soundscape and each more local
soundscape as an ecosystem full of endangered invasive and predatory sounds. In this context, musical or sonic activity primarily took the form not of composing particular musical works, but of altering the nature of the entire sonic flux or a portion of it to suit the aesthetic and physiological needs of living beings. To pursue this project, Schaeffer and a band of like-minded colleagues at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver formed the World Soundscape Project, which set out to analyze existing soundscapes, design alternative acoustic environments, and make creative interventions in the form of discrete compositions and in situ projects. Though the WSP was tuned to the world's soundscape, the magnitude and transcendental nature of this flux also always put it out of earshot. Therefore, in practice, the group's
analytical projects and interventions took place at specific sites, notably the acoustic environment of Vancouver which the WSP examined in detail over the course of several decades so we can go back to this sound clip too if you'd like in our discussion the work of the WSP and in particular composers like Hildegard Westerkamp who became probably the best known of these helped to foster the practice of soundscape composition or field recording which consists in composing with location recordings or simply presenting such documents for aesthetic appreciation field recording is a thriving field today, even more thriving than it's been ever in its history, one taken up by artists such as Jana Vinderen, Toshia Sonoda, Francisco Lopez, and Jakob Kierkegaard. Throughout through the work of these artists, the work of these artists varies quite widely.
All of them are indebted to the basic procedure of Cage's four minutes and 33 seconds, the procedure of sampling the sonic flux of the world and submitting it to aesthetic and conceptual attention. What we know as sound art is founded on two different understandings of what remains out of earshot, and these two understandings return us to the classic philosophical sources I presented at the outset. We've seen that for Cage the fundamental sonic fact is the noise of the world, the perennial flow of all and every sound regardless of source or nature. In this Cage remains a materialist and a naturalist committed to the eternal cacophony of noise the chaos of worldly sound in all its irregularity, multiplicity, and relentless duration. Another early pioneer of sound art, Lamont Young, returns us to the rationalism of Pythagoras and
Leibniz. As he often recounted, Young's early sonic inspiration came from worldly drones, the wind that blew through the walls of the log cabin in which he was raised, the pulsating buzz of crickets, katydids, and cicadas, and the hum of telephone wires and motors. But where Cage was content with the messiness of worldly sound, Young followed Pythagoras in the desire to distill the mathematical essence of sound, to sort of see it as celestial or non-mundane. A disciple of the Hindustani classical singer penned at Pranath, Lamont Young adopted a mystical rationalist conception of anahatanata as an abstract mathematical concept in the mind of God, the Pythagorean equivalent of the music of the spheres. The drones or sustained tones that
characterize his compositions and installations are calculated and notated with mathematical precision continuing the efforts of Pythagoras, Boethius, and Kepler to discern the cosmic harmony and to make it audible. This is evident in his masterwork, The Dream House, a sound and light environment that's existed in various incarnations since 1963 and since 1993 has existed as a permanent installation above Young's loft on Church Street in New York City in Tribeca. The installation consists of a singular rectangular room bathed in magenta light modulated by four mobiles made by Young's partner, Mary and Zazila, and so this is a collaboration between the two of them. And I'm just going to quick, I'm going to show you a quick video clip here that that
So the installation in each corner of the room, a large speaker broadcasts a complex raspy drone generated in real time by a custom made synthesizer. The drone is harmonically static. It's a continuous stream of 35 pitches selected from the harmonic series of a single fundamental 7.5 hertz that's based on the 60 hertz utility frequency of the electrical grid in North America. here's just a quick diagram of the pitches included in Young's piece are the pitches in bold along this kind of ladder. The span of the pitches covers the entire range of human hearing and is arrayed
in an ascending spiral. The title of Young's composition reflects its mathematical construction, its basis in a set of pitches determined purely by mathematical calculation. Yet Young's efforts to align human hearing and feeling with the rational calculus of a celestial order is constrained by a basic fact of the installation's construction. It's basis on the arbitrary and mundane frequency of the electrical grid, a frequency chosen by Jung in order to prevent interference from the ambient hum of electrical devices in the room. Of course there's no reason why the electrical grid should be 60 hertz throughout most of the world. The utility frequency is 50 hertz, and before the standardizations of power line frequencies in the early 20th century there were a lot of different competing proposals for what that frequency should be though aiming for the heavens and for the
eternal and immutable domain of mathematics young is forced to accommodate his project to the maintain to the mundane material condition of of its existence young's project thus runs up against the problem of the fifth hammer encountered by pythagoras it's said that when pythagoras passed by the blacksmith shop, he heard the sound of five hammers. Four of them produced a consonance on which he based his entire musical numerological system, the fourfold or tetractus, right? Well, you'll see, I'll give you a sense of the monochord, right? If you divide the string into two sections, it gives us an octave. Divide it into three sections, it gives you a fifth. Divide into four sections, a fourth. And you can map all of these out in a triangle that has the fundamental
until the octave, the fifth, the fourth, and so on. And it's this that Pythagoras called the Tetractus. And there was an oath that the Pythagoreans had to swear, I swear by he who gives to our heads the fourfold, the origin and root of immortal nature. So four of them produced, the four of the hammers produced this sound, But what about the fifth hammer? We're told that there was a fifth hammer. And Boethius in his account of this famous account of this story of Pythagoras passing by the blacksmith's forge, notes that the fifth hammer was discordant
with all the others and those thus discarded. In his book on the subject, Daniel Heller Rosen takes the fifth hammer to be a figure for a limit, sorry, the fifth hammer to be a limit of rational calculation. It's the figure for everything that can't be rendered as quantity. And herein lies the difference between music and noise, ratio and frequency, logic and physics, the symbolic and the real. And it's this difference that pits Young against Cage as representing two different poles in sound art practice. Like Cage, Young heard the noise of the world the wind that blew through his log cabin in the drones of crickets, katydids, and cicadas, and in the hum of the electrical wires and motors. Yet like countless theologians and rationalists before him,
Jung took this worldly, this perpetual terrestrial cacophony to point to another, better, eternal, and immutable world. By contrast, Cage remained satisfied with worldly sound in all its variety and irrationality. Both are surfers of the sonic flux and devotees of what remains out of earshot, but they construe this flux as operating on different perceptual and conceptual planes. Before concluding, I want to look at one more fairly recent effort to attend to cosmic sound, and I'm thinking of Pauline Oliveros' practice of deep listening and the compositional practice that stems from it. Oliveros was a pioneer in electronic music, co-founding the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, where she produced astonishing compositions using tape delay
configurations and later developed a set of digital sound processing devices for acoustic musicians and improvisers. In the late 1980s, as a result of the sonic experiences she had in a vast underground cistern in Port Washington, in Port Townsend, Washington, Washington State, in the northwest coast of the United States, Olivares began dedicating herself to what she called deep listening. As she later put it, deep listening is listening to every in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you're doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life of nature or one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. It represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. For Oliveros deep listening became a form of
meditation, composition, and performance and it was cultivated through retreats, workshops, group discussions, improvisations, and performances of the text scores that guided listening. However so-called spiritual such a project may be, or may seem to be, deep listening is directed toward the sounds of the world, toward any and all sounds, whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered, or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception. Oliveros goes on, our world is a complex matrix of vibrating energy, matter, and air. Just as we are made up of vibrations, vibration connects us with all beings and to all things interdependently. We open in order to
listen to the world as a field of possibilities. Deep listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps us to change or dissolve limiting boundaries. So from this perspective, Oliveros began to build the concept of the sonosphere. As she describes it, the sonosphere is the sonorous or sonic envelope of the earth created by all vibrations set in motion by natural or technological forces that travel through the earth from its core to beyond earth, air, fire, and water as waves and phonons to receivers. Receivers are humans, all creatures perceiving and using earth bio and technological systems. Vibrations within the range of hearing may be processed consciously or unconsciously. Vibrations beyond the range of human ear are
nevertheless received by the body and processed unconsciously or by other inhabitants of the earth and beyond. However cosmic or expansive, this is not the music of the spheres. It's decidedly worldly and physical, conceiving bodies and environments as complex material entities in various relationships and at various levels of co-vibration. Deep listening requires attention not only to sound but to unsound, those sounds that are out of earshot. For example, it's attentive to sonic memory, or what Oliveros calls auralization, the aural equivalent of imagination. For example, you know, oralization, you can think of it as the songs we sing in our heads or those involuntary earworms that get stuck in our brains like a kind of audio virus. Her composition Primordial Lift asked, and this is a, I'm just putting this, this is the score for
the piece, it's a complex score, and we can come back to it again if you'd like, but the, her composition Primordial Lift asked performers to oralize the sounds of cells dividing, nerves firing, blood circulating, and muscles contracting, along with the sounds of a black hole, of anti-gravity, of particles, and of waves, and to use these as prompts for improvisation. Now these sounds are deliberately metaphorical and are bound to be subjective, but the aim is to extend one's hearing and oral imagination from the most micro to the most macro levels of the sonosphere. As Oliveros puts it in the score, Sorry. As Oliveros puts it in the score, all performers are asked to listen all over to oneself and to others everywhere in the whole of the universe all the time.
The project aims to blur the boundaries between self and other human and non human organic and inorganic particular and universal. It also aims to challenge the distinction between thought, imagination, and sensation. Those sounds we hear in our heads and what we hear in the world are also part of this listening. The body does and can resonate with such auralizations, Oliveros notes. All right, so just a last section, a kind of coda here. I want to conclude with a few brief thoughts about the politics of cosmic sound. One of Lamont Young's former associates, Tony Conrad, attacked Pythagoras's and by extension
Young's project as inherently anti-democratic and in Nietzschean terms ascetic, that is, as creating an esoteric priesthood built around the primacy of numbers and in the process devaluing the material changeable universe in favor of an immaterial eternal realm. Conrad's project Slapping Pythagoras was an effort to recontextualize the drone as a material form of collective discovery and improvisation. This notion of collectivity is a core component of the Vedic tradition which connects its metaphysics to its ethics. Among the most famous aphorisms in that tradition comes from one of the oldest of the Upanishads, the Chandogya Upanishad, which declares tat tvam asi, generally translated as thou art that or you are that. In other words,
there is no proper boundary between self and other, subject and object. The particular is an instance of the universal. A similar notion is at the foundation of Buddhist ethics, which affirms the interdependence of all things and the non-existence of the self. These strands came together in Schopenhauer's metaphysics, which he also connected to in ethics. Remember that for In Schopenhauer, the world as representation, the phenomenal world, including what we take to be the self as a discrete subject, is an illusion. In truth, there are not many particulars, but only one thing or one process, the will, the ceaseless flow of desire or becoming, the single matter energy of the world. His ethics is an ethics of compassion that breaks through the principle of individuation
and acknowledges the truth of the Vedic saying, you are that, the non-distinctness of one thing from another and the common suffering of all. Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer's Buddhist pessimism and sought instead to affirm the world of becoming in all its pain and glory. Yet as we've seen, Nietzsche's metaphysics is fully Dionysian, celebrating the dissolution of the self in collective revelry and intoxication. We've also seen that for Nietzsche, music or sound is capable of inducing this de-differentiation. In a recent essay titled Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect, the poet and theorist Jackie Wang suggests that this experience of de-differentiation is not only ethically, but politically significant. The essay provides an intellectual history of what Freud calls the oceanic feeling,
the feeling of limitlessness or unboundedness that he diagnosed as the true source of religion. And here Freud was saying, look, religion is really, really comes from a kind of feeling. It's not really a, there aren't really gods out there, whatever. It comes from a certain feeling of boundlessness. Now Wang rejects Freud's conclusion that the oceanic feeling is ultimately infantile, a form of regression to the non-differentiation between mother and child. Instead, she affirms the alternative conclusion of Romain Roland, the communist novelist, dramatist, and mystic who rejected religion but accepted the oceanic feeling as a source of joy, creativity, and political community. For Wang, as for Roland,
the oceanic feeling provides the affective or imaginative resources to even begin to envision a mode of existence centered on connectedness over differentiation. Philosophically, she traces this idea to Spinoza's monism and to the post-Marxist adherents it inspired, among them Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri and Franco Bifobo Berardi. But Wang notes, the oceanic feeling is also linked to trauma and to the dissolution of the self it can generate. Among these is the historical trauma of the transatlantic slave trade, which as Fred Moten theorizes generates blackness as a paradoxical mode of subjectivity that disrupts the very notion of the subject as singular, at once nothing less than, sorry, nothing and less than one,
and also multiple and excessive. Instead of advocating for the resolution of this trauma in an accession to full subjectivity, Wang and Moten maintain that the oceanic dissolution of the self can be construed as what she calls a terrible gift and a source of ecstatic joy. Whether we construe it as oceanic or Dionysian, Wang invites us to consider the mode of being available through cosmic sound as inherently political as providing an affective foundation for social modes that are communistic, the illumination of an already existing communalism and the direct experience of our embeddedness in the world, a point of departure for new socialities and political models that do not rely on discrete selves. So thank you. I will stop
sharing my screen and we can we can go to our respondents yeah yeah thank you so much Christoph I think we should have like six minutes break so we meet again at 12 10 eastern time just to grab a glass of water and so on and then we'll have the discussion sounds good good thanks Thank you.
Okay, so when all are coming back, of course, difficult to tell, but let's do it like introduced in the beginning of the seminar. We have three student presentations of around 10 minutes each from Hao, Zenobio, and Zenobio, Maria and then some responses by Alejandra you see Nikita, Rolando, Sebastian, Vincent and Nima in that order and I see that there has also been some raised hands so maybe we'll prioritize the
presentations and the responses first and then to all other questions please post them in the Q&A or in the chat so we can like keep track of them and try to to get to everyone good so by that how yeah hi can you hear me yes yeah okay um well first of all uh thanks for your presentation Well, the text provided by Christoph is quite hardcore philosophical to me, so I should apologize first for the maybe incoherent presentation.
So the text suggests that materialist account can provide a model for rethinking artistic production in general, in the manner of Nietzsche and Deluxe, to also to understand different beyond the domain of culture, signification and representation. That is to see this cultural process as particular manifestation of the field of nature and manner. I quote in the text, I found it productively inevitable as before we tried to explore the signification and representation of sound,
our bodies and our affections are targeted first. first, just as when we hear like national ethems or revolutionary slogan, even with presumptions, our bodies react with those sounds before our brains process the political purpose behind them. And also I quote, music has been acknowledged as non-presentational arts, and this text argues that the sonic arts are not more abstract than the visual, but rather
more concrete and that they require not a formalist analysis but a materialist one. I agree with this and I'd like to add something to the agreement as to question if there is a a distinction between music and sonic arts, like all the music sounds and disordered noise in music theory, which is based on a quite hierarchical framework, like a container among all the disordered audible sounds that covers a wider range towards infinity.
So if sound in general is an ocean, then music is a like a systematic container or retainer that brings part of the water to the, to within this range. In other words, through the lens of materialism, if the sound is a fact, then music is a fiction. and today's music has been through constant redefining that what is music whereby expanding its territory so I found it's pretty much related to territorialization and re-territorialization
and in the practice of composition composers often describe sounds such as as minor sounds or flat key sounds in addition to establishing alternative notation. In a way, the composer gives a shape to the sound in the text. The sound works, this place in the gallery space are often visualized or object-fied. And what the text suggested is that both Nietzsche and De Lourdes invite us to think of music
not simply as the rendering audible in, of inaudible forces in general, but also to participating in a particular nature flux. Therefore, all kinds of sounds, all kinds of sound arts can be seen as an event. And retrospect at the John Cage's four minutes and 33 seconds, one of its legacies is to think that all sounds can be music. and silence is also part of the materiality of sound.
As long as there is a mediator, a silent environment will not exist, etc. And I'm looking at the audience's cognition of the work, which is also constructed in a transferred context. text. This process of deterritorialization creates another new territory, which is to re-territor. So the silent work forms a like a directional field, a cognitive re-territorialization.
concept might be on its performance. A viewer may not have to spend the whole duration to get the whole work. In this sense, the property of this work, time-based, could be eliminated. For the viewing experience can it be seen much likely as an object that's what i'm wondering and also in the text i quote art provides an opening onto the impersonal and pre-personal transcendental felt that Deluids variously called the plan of an imminence or a body without organs. And the
concept of a body without organs in the text kind of moves towards what is art through the lens of Deluxe. The way of which I initially associated with this also could be related to biological and social political aspects. So if we move further to where we see and listen to artworks, maybe in an institutional space. So I'm also wondering, could a body without organs be possible to, sorry, to create a fluid creative space
as a body without organs in gallery space? That's my presentation, thanks. Thanks a lot, Hal. We have noted the questions, so we jump to Sinobio. Okay, first of all, thank you, Christoph, for your great presentation. And thank you, Hal, for yours too. I also have no philosophical training, but so my presentation could have some also incoherences, but I found your texts very clarifying in taking some concepts of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Deleuze and bringing some
uh yeah this difficult concept into more uh more easy more graspable ones let me just share my screen okay um Are you seeing the screen? Okay. So if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This philosophical experiment, which origin is not accurate, has been made for a long time and with some changes in the structure. It immediately opens
the possibility for two answers yes or no based on the state answer we can roughly divide the philosophical tradition into realists and idealists if a thinker replies that a sound is made their thinking tends towards realism if the answer is no then the thinker tends to be an idealist nevertheless there are some concepts that need to be clarified before any reaction is taken What is inside the sounds? What are they as energy? These questions were asked by Marian Amacher in her text, Synaptic Island Upcybatonal Topology, as Christoph Cox put in the text.
Based on them and with the thought of Christoph Cox expressing his book, Sonic Flux, I begin an attempt to answer what sound is, a possibly ontological response, however, without totalitarian, simplistic or essentialist connotations. I try to articulate what is inside the sound or what constitutes it, what are these basic structures, and specifically what it is as energy. After all, what is energy? Although the concept of energy has different definitions, not only over time, but also in different disciplines of scientific knowledge, the standard model of elementary particles manage together the energies, more commonly called forces, referring to some field,
always relational and non-objectual to four main fields. The gravitational energy related to the gravitational field incorporated in the graviton, not yet confirmed, but theoretically expected. The electromagnetic energy related to the electromagnetic field incorporating the photon. The weak nuclear energy related to the nuclear field incorporating in the W and Z bosons. bosons and finally the strong nuclear energy related to the strong nuclear field incorporated in the gluons each incorporation of forces called bosons has some power to affect other particles
by changing their flavors or by joining different fermions and we can see the interactions in this diagram. Thus the unified theory of the fields created some hypotheses yet to be tested, still limited by their energy expenditure requirements. One is string theory, which predicts that all matter constituting only five percent of the known universe is made up of extremely small strings with different topologies vibrating in different ways and are these vibrations that determine which particle will be perceived on a more distant scale, determining its properties such as mass,
charge, flavor, etc. So if the strain vibrates in the x-way, it will be a top quark. If it vibrates in the y way it will be a bottom quad or z being a graviton so dynamic quanta in a relationship of tension with all of the dynamic quanta whose essence consists in their relation to all other quanta we can take them the dionysian perpetual creation and destruction of appearances as the strings that create and destroy matter and then changes how it is perceived in bigger scales whilst still remaining as imminent field of fluxes so the sound is so far defined as sound
physics vibrations in a medium such as air and sound psychology association and auditory experience here the first definition of sound as vibration is taken thus also encompassing what is called in art unsound vibrations that humans cannot access through the cochlea sensor a type of vibration vibrational art could then be proposed in a medium between the interaction of matter and energy for the materialist realist turn argued by nature regarding nature to be artistic and creative as the were artists of the world presenting the forces imminent to the materials and media with
which it operates or the capture from the imminent flow of sound and sound vibration and how not to represent but presenting a play of sonic forces and hexities this materialist account can provide a model and here i i quote for rethinking artist production in general and for avoiding the conceptual pitfalls encountered by the prevailing theories of representation and signification. According to Cox, music or rather sound makes in here I quote, makes audible the general floods of forces and movements that constitute natural natural becoming, duration, pressure, tension and relaxation, attraction and repulsion,
consistency and dissolution and so on pure tendencies intensities in events presented independently of the world of bodies and objects that constitute the domain of representation integration so sound makes unsound audible or sound makes vibrations from the general general sonic vibrational immanent cosmotic flux perceptible to human beings. Using this construction of sound as a presentation of an immanent and always in flux vibrational field, I would like to research in the future this construction of vibrational words for design and how design could have a realistic and materialistic approach instead of discursive,
rhetorical, semiotic or semiological. The great problems of dealing this linguistic turn towards design and also for the production of objects to be used by humans is the blindness that language could cause in relation to material problems. For Berkeley, for example, as long as I am not perceiving any physical chemical variation in the atmosphere, it does not exist. Just as the universe did not exist before the human being nor will it exist after he is extinguished we extinguished we would not we would not know the creation of the universe and we would not have any human extinction in view as it would be uh illogical however we are all heading towards the greatest
existential risk of annihilation and we need new approaches to deal with our production consumption and use of artifacts not only for art thanks thanks lots of you i don't know i am i'm not sure if if i was the only one who could not see all your slides but i could definitely hear your voice so so that was good okay um so last of the presentations is maria if she's there okay she doesn't seem to be in the list
No, I'm here. Oh, you're there. Oh, that's good. Thanks a lot to Christopher for your presentation and for all the presentations we had after. I basically have, together with the questions that were posed in the presentations, Another one that I was thinking of while reading on sonic materialism, which actually leads back to one of the first texts that we discussed in the seminar, which was by Robin James, where she criticized the new materialism as relying on physics of resonance and posing it as the fact that they
anyway tried to abstract systemic domination away as she put it, and kind of trying to put everything and everyone on the same continuity without attention to some different localities that are produced like everywhere and by everyone. So in other words, I guess my question is about how the notion of situatedness can be embedded into this form of ontology and into this mode of knowledge production. Because, and I was also interested in like the last section of Christoph's presentation where he talked about communality, because it was, I was thinking that
communality can also occur in the moment of pointing attention to the particular differences in the position and differences in the available navigational instruments. So this kind of move to try and say that we're all in this cosmic flow of sound and flux of sound is like one step, but then the second one could be looking still at how we can form this kind of metaphor in reality and for these cities needed to, I think, look at this very situatedness and the availability or non-availability of hearing for particular individuals or particular groups and so on.
And that's what I have now. Thanks a lot Nikisa. Rolando. Yes, here I am. Hi. Well, I would like to thank Christoph for this really nice presentation. I really enjoyed this extended time-lapse that we don't usually have, you know, like or how it has expanded during the last years. I did begin with this research of the 20th century practices, but now we were like talking about the sound fossils.
I found really fascinating this idea of the sound fossil, even when I'm not able to talk about it now, just like the idea of knowing that this is like a concept or something that we can grasp in the, it's really interesting. One of the things I was really interested is the idea of correlation, this idea that the real is correlated with our mode of apprending. Because during the last year, I've been really critical with the way we are writing sound practices in general.
I'm really into this idea of the cosmogonist and all these other cosmogonists that also use sound but are not taken into account just because political or social reasons. So I like this idea of course these other ways of listening or these other Cosmo auditions are still real but are now correlated with other modes of upbringing reality, which I find really fascinating to understand as well to say that.
And to talk also, I also really enjoy this idea of the audio sphere by Paulino Oliveros, which I think it's like it englobes all these ways of dealing with sound, which is not only the things, as I said, the things that sound, but the thing that we imagine that sound or the things we can, as uh raham harman say you know the things that we can even like uh hallucinate it's part of the reality and and i think for me this idea of cosmovision is just like a way of position our listening in this audio sphere and uh yeah just like i would
like to add to this conversation to some of these events or these other things that I've seen in the last years about the Cosmolvician or about all this correlation with the sound. For example, just like a couple of months, my family is from an indigenous community and we went to this town and there's like this problem between like a lance between like two neighbors and the police came and they interview a tree you know like they were not interviewing persons but the tree was the most important element of this fight because was the older of of the of all the persons that we were around so uh yeah like they saw how old the tree was and then they said like yeah the tree is the
the you know the being that is most yeah that can talk more than us because he's been here for like longer than than this than this like a discussion so yeah we only needed like one of the neighbors that knew my grandfather that like knew that this tree was there for more than 35 years and then they opened part of the tree to see that it was actually 35 years. And like, yeah, of course the tree was right. So this problem was solved because the tree was like speaking. And other of the situation was like, there's this anthropologist called Carlos Lergensdorf who went to talk with a community called Tojolavales. And well, he spent, I guess, like four years
with them. So at some point, of course, he probably was overwhelmed, and he needed some like privacy. And he went out of the town to be alone. And then like a little kid went running, you know, like after him to ask like, why he wants to be alone because the whole of Alex thing that like to want to, you know, to, to, to want to have silence or to want to be alone is the willing of death that you want to be dead soon. So they like instead of like letting him to be alone and in a silent peace all the community took him to like a small reunion and they were talking and they were just like uh pushing him to be part of the community instead of trying to be out which i find like a different like understanding
of silence or of understanding of how you position the idea of solitude um and just like to to finish this idea, I would like to talk about these persons called Tiemperos, which is like these people that after they were hit by a thunder or they were called in dreams, they started to go to the mountains to offer different rituals or in their dreams they have to go to certain parts of the mountain to make rain happen in their communities. So they have the belief that actually they are the ones who are controlling the time of the world, basically, by dreaming.
So I'm really interested in these other ways of listening because one of them, them. In an interview, he says that he has listened to God. But like, it's like something that I read or that I was listening in Christopher's presentation when like, I think they are saying that, of course, the planets and the spheres are standing, but they don't have the ability of listening to them. So this guy called El Hermanito is like this guy who's apparently listening to God and he can cure people. But anyway, he says all the time that he listens to God, but he cannot actually listen what he's saying in language. He knows that he's only speaking truth
to him and that he accepts what he says to him, but he actually doesn't understand any of the things that he's saying. So I find really interesting all these ritualistic or shamanic ways of listening that are like that we could think that are like a part of previous or like an ancestral way of being of but this is actually in the present you know they are still existing and yeah and I think it's like I like this idea of putting these practices that seem part of the past in the present because they are still existing and they're still part of this audio sphere and well that's all i have to say thank you thanks a lot rolando some really
really interesting perspectives looking forward to hear an answer from cox on that one um sebastian i can't see him in the list so sebastian if you are there then make some sound otherwise we're going to vincent Can you hear me? Yes. Thank you Christophe for such a remarkable presentation and also for the presenters. This is a sort of initial reaction to the reading toward a sonic materialism from Christophe's book, Sonic Flux, Sound, Art, and Metaphysics. So, if the purpose of sonic materialism is to reject a strand of correlationism that
that posits sound as only accessible or correlative at the limits of experience or discourse in order to give way to an ontology of music that is contingent to nature or natural fluxes? How can such a materialism take into account the tendency to reduce changes, external to knowable matter, as non-autonomous occurrences? I am specifically thinking of the example of degradation of signals and frequencies in deep space exploration that undermines the sleek transmission and return of data to Earth? If so, does this reduce sound as pure anonymous noise in varying valences, frequencies, and volumes that encounter our auditory sensation or noetic zims?
Second, for Deleuze, music has the capacity to, quote, render non-sonorous forces sonorous, or to paraphrase it, render unsound energies into sound. If art is a practice with the potential of experimentation with the non-human or inhuman, how can this sonic materialism account for the sonic potential with which we cannot have access to? A potential we can only point to our name but which remains impervious to demands of human cognition. Does this fall into the trap of an optimistic presupposition of information that we cannot really apprehend? I think that's about it. Thanks a lot, Vincent. And the last one of the responders is Nima.
Thank you so much for all the amazing presentations. So I thought I would talk about Brian Kinn's article and especially maybe useful because we talk about it in some studies, we talk about literary culture. And the two points, and maybe more than two, that I want to make. One of them is that Keynes is criticizing Goodman's concept of effect and the fact that, because Goodman's, we believe that effect is prior to representation or signification, and it's affect of one body when that when one body acts on another and the moment of
our laboratory impact comes before cognition gets underway and he also talks about what impacts the body before it is divided into discrete sensory modes and kane's criticism of good man is basically that one cannot separate cognition from effect and he says if effect is ontological operating at an imperceptible level beneath the subject's representation how can a change in knowledge produce a change in affect my point here is that it i believe that it is possible that to bypass the knowledge even if it comes back after the effect.
And it is also interestingly two-folded because it's like a two-folded argument because it goes back to the Goodman's idea of the effect coming before cognition because I believe that effect can still be there even after the cognition after the knowledge and for that i can think about the ritual you know and ritualistic traditions where there is signification there is representation and all the aesthetic codes at the beginning but through the process they are dissolved and they turn to different forces and different velocity and energies like for example i have been in certain rituals of like certain mystic rituals
when they have those means of representation and all those rules and aesthetic codes but through the rituals they let's say they you know they repeat the name of a very privileged sufi right and through the process that name loses its meaning and it turns to a musical object basically you know that kind of reorganize things that kind of regenerate the whole thing and it turns to some kind of effect you know that is not about perception anymore so that's one thing that i wanted to mention about the good man the other thing which i'm like really happy to to to talk about with Mr. Cot is that um and then I I've selected a couple of uh phrases from the art here
and it refers mostly about the signification in sound art and the culture between music and sound art and this is something that I think a lot about as a composer so So one of the things is that as opposed to the autonomy and formalism of absolute music, and I think this is, I don't know if I did it right if it's by Mr. Cox or Kane, as opposed to the autonomy and formalism of absolute music, some art reveals the very nature of sound, immaterial flux or flow, a site for perpetual difference, and a series of gradients and potential in constant change. Rather than limit sound to what is heard in our vision
or to the ratios of human perception, Mr. Cox argues that sound itself is endlessly creative and self-differed. Musical forms actualized sound, yet sound itself is always aligned with the visual. Which I completely agree. And again, another quote by Mr. Cox, that the most significant sound art work of the past half century have has explored the materiality of sound, its texture and temporal flow, its palpable effect on an affection by the materials through and against which it is transmitted. Here is the thing that when it comes to the article when it says
Music participating in the symbolic and imaginary order is an assemblage that captures sound and turns it into form. Through composition, music directs attention away from sound as such and onto formal features of its organization. So my question is that how do we define music? And when we talk about music, in what time, in what era, in which year, constantly change the way that we think about music, constantly change. And if you think about the music of the 21st century and later 20th century, this is not the way that I think about that music, that this is not about the way that is organizing
form, but it is mostly about going inside the sun actually. It's the same thing that Mr. Kali actually talks about very much. And my argument here is that maybe, let's say, we talk about cages silence piece, right? Or a lot of music that is combined with some kind of visual art. There's no guarantee that you're actually going into the, inside the sound or inside this music in those kind of mediums. Because let's say in the case cages silence, we are already after considering that how Hinojeev- Much a part time how long ago that piece was you already know that piece there's so much politics around it and it's immediate it's kind of goes into the room of symbolism for us now.
Hinojeev- You know, because, especially if we have experienced the piece and not that we know that how to listen to the piece to the surrounding environment. And again, exactly the same thing that happens with the connection of sound arts when it is combined with visual art is that the moment you have this machine, the moment you turn the knob, that's a compositional act. You're changing, you're doing something with the form. And it is also, there's no guarantee that you're inside the sound because there's also a lot of, you're thinking about the concepts here. You might not think about the melody, but you are thinking about the concept that definitely affects the way that you perceive the sound that is coming. So that is basically my, some of the things that came to my mind just going through these
articles. Thank you so much. Thank you, Nima. Okay, Christoph, we have quite a lot of questions here. Yeah, so just quickly, thank you to to how and Zenobio and Nikita, Rolando, Vincent, and Nima. Really great responses. I really appreciate it. It's always great to talk about, you know, to talk about these, to hear about how the work sort of registers with people and the questions it prompts. So many different things. And I want to make sure that I get to these questions. So if I don't, if there's something that stood out for you or that I don't get to, just be sure to just raise your hand, put it in the chat, whatever. Because I want to start with a particular issue
that I think was raised by Nikita. Yeah, the question of Robin James' critique. And I guess my response to that is sort of similar to my response to Brian Kane's critique, right? So broadly that critique goes that the kind of ontological or materialist approach to sound disregards the ways in which sound actually is inhabited by particular people and particular cultures in the world. And it seeks to sort of blur all difference into the world. to some sort of generic, a cultural sound.
And it seems to me that that's just, that's kind of a misplaced criticism in the same way that, and this is just an analogy, right? Physics is different from literature, right? You don't criticize literature for saying it's not physics, right? It's just to say that these operate at different scales, so, but to get to the, And so it seems that a notion of the sonic flux absolutely requires a consideration of its very precise cultural instantiations, which is why particular audio cultures, it's very valuable to think about how those fit within an overall, within a broader scale domain.
um but the the question that that that um uh Nikita raised was really important one and that that refers to ethics and politics and I think the claim here is that I think uh James's claim is that um that that the the materialist account or the or the ontological account blurs difference and in blurring difference it can't have any proper ethics or politics because ethics and politics requires dealing with difference, right? So if you abstract from, as I think the quotation that Nikita presented was, abstracting from systemic domination. Think about it this way, there are
two moments in any ethical relation. If I have no relationship to you whatsoever, if I have no, if the encounter has no connection or relation, then I can't possibly have an ethical relationship with you, right? In other words, so ethics is premised on some notion of connection or relation, without which there's no, I have no obligations, right? I don't take myself to have ethical obligations to rocks, right? Now, actually that I'm gonna take that back. I don't think that's true actually, but in other words, like if I don't have, I think I do in a sense in which we can talk about. But if I have no ethical relation, if I have no relationship whatsoever,
if there's no connection, then I can neither value nor devalue the other. So ethics requires that. But it also requires an acknowledgement of difference because if ethics, if there's no, an ethical relation requires that I have an obligation towards something. And so there, I think, so this can, the Vedic or the Buddhist or the Schopenhauerian ethical position, which assumes a general connection of all things, that's the first premise of ethics. It's not the second. The second premise of ethics, and this is similar to my response to Cain,
the second premise is to acknowledge and to negotiate difference. And so again, I think the critique is misplaced because it misplaces the level of relation. We can talk about that further if you'd like. So many other questions and comments and thoughts. I, to go back to, I mean, I thought that Howe's really rich kind of glosses and developments of some of my, of some of the ideas in that, in that sonic materialism piece were really helpful. I like the relationship of music and the sonic arts in relationship to the sort of container and
and the broader oceanic. And maybe I can connect the Howe's initial comment with something that Nima mentioned just a moment ago, which is thinking about this relationship between music and sound art. So I think there are people who, there are people, there are theorists who really want to make a kind of firm distinction between these two things, which makes no sense to me. But it seems to me almost to think of them as poles, right? As poles. And Anima, I think you're really right in thinking that anything can become symbolic, representational, cultural, if it's well known enough. But then I like your, you flip that
and you suggest that the alternative can be the case, too, that in meditative context or in mystical context, representational when repeated over and over again can also become evacuated of its meaning and there I'm thinking and this is why for me something like sound poetry is really interesting right because we know I think it's probably fair to say that all poetry is attentive to sound right that's that's one of the key features of and I mean prose is too but we might say if there's a distinction between prose and poetry it's that poetry pays very specific attention to sound. That too is relative, right? It's not like, you know, novelists don't care about this, right? But
but then if we go further on that scale, we can think of this as a kind of slider, the sound poet tries to evacuate meaning and pay attention just to the material sound of language, right? I mean, and again that that's probably an overstatement but so all of these it's a matter of of a spectrum here um and again i think that that one of the things that both how and nema were pointing out is that that spectrum you can slide along that spectrum and that something that appears as music could could could become could sort of lose its contextualization and its formalization and and and take on a characteristic of of sound art or sound poetry or something like that and to me it's not important to make the firm distinction but rather sorry it's not important for me to make
a binary opposition to the two but some distinction is very helpful in sorting out what the thing is trying to do or not even what it's trying to do what it ends up doing right what does sound poetry do um well it focuses it focuses our attention on something um focuses our attention on on the on the sonic, you know, sort of nature of language. So yeah, let's see, there are all sorts of other things. I really enjoyed Zenobio's presentation. I love this idea. It was kind of seemed to me like to be a kind of amplification of that sort of Nietzschean notion that nature is the ore artist of the world and uh uh uh zenovio's tour into sort of subatomic physics as as as a sort of physics of
vibration that's one of the reasons why i began with the milford graves and i ended with the um ended with the pauline oliveros because i think both of those figures what they're really interested in is seeing how within our capacities and it's not just our natural physical capacities right but all of them are interested in technological prostheses as well. How fully we can sort of extend our hearing, and if not our hearing, then our oral imagination, our oralization, to the micro level, to the macro, to the level of the sort of macrocosmos. And again, doing that is a kind of ethical act, which is I think something that Zenobio got to at the end of at the end of the presentation, which is that, you know, this existential threat of climate change
or, you know, climate disaster or whatever, if we don't feel our ethical obligations, not only to human beings, but to the, you know, in a certain sense, the planet, I think, you know, we're going to kill ourselves, which we're really rapidly and we're really rapidly doing and doing quite well. And so here, that's why I said I don't have ethical obligations to rocks. I'm not sure that I don't think that that's true actually. But so again, from the Robin James perspective, I can see how moving the ethical obligations from humans to non-humans to whatever can seem to be not attending to really important issues of systematic
you know domination but it seems to me that we can hold both of those in one scope we can say systematic racism is massively a problem to which all of us need to attend but so is climate disaster and those two things as it turns out are related right insofar as as climate disaster you know, by far more fully affects, you know, the non-white majority of the planet than it affects, you know, the relatively wealthy North American and European, you know, executives and whatever for whom, who are the sort of fomenters of this massive climate emergency.
so these two things are related but again they they require that one occupies different scales so scale is such an important notion in in in my work and it's again one of the reasons why I wanted to begin with Graves and and Oliveros because it's all about that shifting of scales so many other things let's see how had a had a question that I'm not sure I quite got right I want to get at some things that Vincent said as well, but Hao got at the question about 433 and its status as an object. I'm not quite sure I got it when I was writing it down. I'm not quite sure I got it right. I don't know if Hao wants to sort of expand on that or. Yeah, I think what I mean is that
for the audience's experiences very closely to you stand here to viewing a sculpture. I think, yeah, okay, I see. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the great things about that piece, and I said this to begin with, it's always very hard to talk about four minutes and 33 seconds, because it's so, I think as Nima pointed out, like it's so standard. I mean it's like that it's, but I think it's really, I think it's one of those things where if we take it and we actually sort of plumb into its, you know, sort of depths we can get somewhere. Yeah, I mean I think what that piece tries to do, and this goes back to some of the things we were saying about music
and sound art, is it takes the frame of music, right, it has a score, initially it was performed by a performer in a space, right? So it takes that frame and it opens up that frame to other things. So it is like an object in a sense, right? It is like an object in the sense that most of, many times that piece is performed or whatever. It's performed by people in, people sitting in a, sorry, it's received by people sitting in a theater or something like that, perceiving it as a musical composition in the same way that they might perceive a sculpture or painting as an object before them. But I think it's the point of that frame for me, and it's
is that it deconstructs in the kind of literal Derridian sense of the term, it deconstructs that that sort of opposition between between music and sound, because it's that frame that allows something to enter into it that disrupts the status of music because if four minutes and 33 seconds is a musical piece then music needs to be exploded or then it sort of explodes the bounds of what music can be I think. Yeah so I think I understand that. Yeah so there are other things as well but I'm wondering either if people want to raise questions you know in the chat or via hands, looking through my notes here about. Also, feel free just to speak up.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, OK, I have a question. I agree and I think I understood this possibility of coexistence between the more ontological materialist position of sound art and more political or cultural or whatever. But what in your opinion is the value of this, because you say that some of the most important and I'm quoting from memory, but some of the most important sound art of the last 50 years more on this camp of materialism. But why is that more important in your opinion?
It doesn't need to be super than the other camp, or what's the value of that in comparison? Because I remember, I think it was in some of Lawrence Abu Hamdan's text that we read for a seminar that didn't happen yet so i'm not remembering super clearly but he talks about the in all this his relation to to sound of guns and and this sort of political and juridical use of of sound and i related that to the i think it's cubic site work right that you cite in one of the texts and in the one you cite it's very okay there's the sound of of the bullets
and there's the text that's showing what the bullet is what the the gun is but you talk about how this this relation of the public to this is very i don't know not affected by not not affected by the violence of it not affected but it's also it's actually a calm i don't know it's it's not And in Abraham's work, it's very the opposite of that. And he actually denounces how, for example, the media created a spectacle of these images of war and how it can be separated. You can see the TV, but you don't feel the violence that is actually happening to actual human beings.
And yeah, how do you relate that to this disposition of the... I don't know if I make myself clear, but I relate this sort of thing. So okay, you have this sort of gaze in hearing that is very more attentive to the material and tries to not hear the violence that's in these examples, for example. And what do you think is the value of that in relation to the, or why do you think that is more valuable, if you do think that's more valuable, than hearing the violence, hearing the political, hearing the cultural thing that relates to that sound, that relates to that, right? Hopefully I make myself clear now. Yep, yep. I don't think it's more important. I think it's as important.
I think it's a matter of sorting out various kinds of levels. So think about it this way. I think some of the great what Paul Ricoeur called the sort of masters of suspicion in in 19th century thought you know Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche their key move so with Freud Freud wanted to say that manifest conscious activity has an unconscious backdrop and that's important to understand that unconscious backdrop so we can understand consciousness, subjectivity, sexuality, etc. Marx wanted to point out that what's taken as
obvious, the commodity form for example, we have to think about that, we have to demystify that and reveal the famous passage on the fetishism of commodities. We have to reveal what the material conditions that precede that, right? And for Nietzsche, Nietzsche is just full of, let's think about the value of values, right? So there's always an effort to sort of to take manifest phenomena and to show their material conditions. And so much of 20th century art is all about that as well. I think of people like Godard and Brecht and whatever, right? let's not what is let's not just show a film but it's important to say
you know how does film how does the mechanism of film actually work how how are its ideological effects produced and these kinds of things right so that to me that level i i take something like the relationship of sort of sound art music as we were talking about it before to be about a sort of shift in scale or level um but the point you it's an interesting connection you make between the Chris Kubik piece and Lawrence Alba Hamdan's work, a piece I just published in Resonance Magazine, if you email me I can send it to you, I don't think it's up yet on my website but I can send it to you, is exactly about how to think about politics as a politics of flows and it draws heavily on Lawrence's work, I mean primarily on conflicted phonemes which, you know, very well-known
work. But so if you think about politics, politics, the term politics has to do with the polis, right? It has to do, it really has to do with who is and isn't a citizen, right? Who's a citizen and who's a barbarian. And this has everything to do with global flows of human beings, of global migration, the global circulation of music and the impediments it finds. So I mean, the point of conflicted phonemes for example is is to think exactly about not the words one says I mean it's uh so I don't know many of you probably know that piece right conflicted phonemes it's it concerns the ways in which Dutch immigration officers called upon um acoustics experts to be able to determine
whether asylum seekers were actually from the region, you know, the particular locations they claim to be from, right? So there, it's that very careful attention to sound that determines whether this person is a legitimate claimant or a not legitimate claimant. And it's not, this is not about the symbolic register. It's not about words and meaning. It's about the nature of sound and how sound roots one in place and so I think when the the um a notion of the pol of the politics of sound has to take into account all sorts of registers of signification and representation but it also has to take the the broader level of sound and sonic flows across the planet right so I don't think again I don't think those things are at odds with
one another they're they're complementary um and it's always a bit striking to me when when when people um you know um when when theorists wonder about think that politics has to be located in one one place or another yeah um i don't know if that was helpful um yeah um i have a sort of a question um isn't it like um i feel like when we open so much the the space for like acoustic uh for like a sonic flux or like a soundscape or wherever uh we sort of uh need a new parameter of defining the what's music ontologically like we lost the notation
system right but now we have this all these formats for co-defined audio like the mp3 so that what is like uh what is what defines the the four minutes and three three seconds it's it's not the presentation anymore but it's that it's some like uh gadget playing uh uh some codified format right so how much did we actually like free ourselves from the this ontology of music because uh once we lose the older ontology we create a new one to define what's music and what's not right uh So yeah, and I'm thinking here of course of like Jonathan Stern's like archaeology of sound, right? But that's a question. Yeah, yeah, that's helpful. Yeah, and one of the chapters of Sonic Flux is
it's essentially about the history of audio recording, but in a slightly broader way. I mean Stern's obviously great on that thinking about audio, you know, kind of since and just before Edison. But if we think of audio recording really broadly, if we think of it in terms of the registration of sound, memory is a form of audio recording, written notation is a form of audio recording, and then the whole sequence of wire recorder, phonograph, tape recorder, mp3, etc. And each of those, I think it's important, each of those you write is a kind of container and each of them and I don't like to sort of overuse these Deleuzian terms but I think it's really fruitful to think in terms of territorialization and re-territorialization
of sound. So what if we think about the record, what the phonograph record did, on the one hand it was total reification of sound. Sound is on this object, sound is now an object. On the other hand that object could travel all over the world in principle and could carry sound from the past into the future etc. The mp3 does that in a kind of you know crazy way right because the mp3 isn't it's not an object anymore right I mean it's a chunk of code but that chunk of code can circulate so much more rapidly and yet it also you know it captures sound in a particular format in a particular slice of code so we always have to be thinking about I think exactly as you're saying what is the container for this for this for this object or for this for this process and how is it
that every every form of recording is a form of reification turns and turns a process into an object um but it also allows for that process to to you know to circulate become extended everybody on their computer can manipulate an mp3 in seconds right so it it we have to think of all of these as ways that that both stop the flow of sound and also sort of like increase it that territorialize sound and sort of de-territorialize it at once um yeah and 433 is i mean 433 is a recording in that sense because it's a frame it's a form for that kind of um for for a certain kind of and you're right it can i mean as as others have pointed out it can lose its its purchase right yeah yeah
Vincent had a question that again that I'm also looking at my notes about sort of about non-sonarist forces and the inhuman and I'm wondering is that can you rephrase that question because I found it interesting but I wasn't quite sure that I got it right is the second of the two questions that you presented. Okay. I'm thinking if art is a practice with, you know, reserved potential of experimentation with the non-human or inhuman or even more than human, how can an idea of sonic materialism account
for the sonic potential with which we cannot have access to something along the questioning. Yeah, I mean, I think that so broadly, the various folks that I presented in the talk, and I'm thinking particularly of the sort of two bookends of the piece that Milford Graves and Pauline Oliveros are trying to extend, we can extend the sounds of, we can extend our access to sound beyond the human generally with technological prosthesis, right?
We can understand, we can get a sense of cosmic sound, right? Which carries us in a certain sense beyond the human, right? We can get a sense of, the sounds of cells dividing, right? Which carries us beyond human capacities. Now, all of that is gonna be, it's always to some degree limited by human cognition, but this, I suppose this goes back, this really goes back to the sort of Meissu's notion of correlation and are we always trapped within that correlation of the human access and its object? Or do we have the capacity both conceptually and sonically to extend beyond that?
And I'm a realist in the sense that I think Mayasue's point about the Archae fossil is that conceptually we can extend ourselves beyond, like vastly beyond the very emergence of human beings. Right? And that was the point of my initial example about the sonic fossil. What we see in the skies is a sonic fossil, and we can trace the genesis of that sonic fossil, which is to say that we can get beyond or outside of our human condition in order to understand, grasp, perhaps even hear the world as it existed prior to the very emergence of consciousness
life, etc. Right? So it's that capacity to extend. And I think that Oliveros and Graves are doing that on a more local scale or on a less, you know, cosmic scale perhaps. I don't know if that responds to that question yeah um just just looking at the looking at the chat um yeah i will say i'll say that my favorite i don't i don't think it's available anyway um uh my favorite version of 433 and i'll just put it in the chat
It's a great video by, I think she's Dutch, maybe Belgian, artist Manon Deboer. It's a fantastic piece, a fantastic video called Two Times Four Minutes and 33 Seconds. And it basically is, it's the video recording of a performance of the piece with Luc Faschon, who's a Belgian pianist. And he performs the piece on piano. And the first time around, you hear the sound of the performance space.
You hear diegetic sound or sound of the performance space. And the second time around, it's the same performance. And the camera does the same. actually the camera sort of traces around the room, but the sound is shut off and the sound shifts to the space of the viewer. And it's kind of a nice, it does that kind of nice foreground background that shifts, the first one shifts your attention from music to sound and from inside the frame. And the second shifts the sound, shifts attention between the visual frame and the auditory frame in which the viewer is located. And it's quite nice. It's elegant. It's like whatever, as you might imagine, two times 40 minutes, three seconds. It's like a little, it's about 10 minutes long.
It's lovely, yeah. I don't know if it's, I don't think it's probably available on YouTube. She's quite protective of it as an artwork, so. The other questions or comments or things I didn't get to from the presentations I'm happy to take up. Maybe I have a general question. The idea of this quote by Deleuze that the matter itself is endlessly creative. Matter generates its own forms and each form in its transitory existence is an actualization of the virtual. What if you think about that the matter is not able to do that anymore that the matter has lost its ability to generate itself like the
natural is not natural anymore and we need to reconstruct it again and then what what would be the practice of you know making sounds anymore you know like what how we can think about like if we can think about pathology of the sounds in some way to just actually really go into the sound honestly, what is the behavior of the component and elements of this sound? Yeah, I mean, I suppose the one answer to that is when nature stops actualizing the virtual, we're all dead, so it doesn't matter. I mean, yeah, because I mean, I sometimes I've gotten criticized for this.
I have a, not a former student, but who's at my institution a while ago, Ben Pickett, who, you know, sort of criticizes my continued use of a term like nature, which I grant is problematic, right? But I continue to use it because I'm reluctant to kind of fold nature into culture, right? And to sort of say like, ah, nature is a cultural construction. And I kind of want to do the opposite to fold culture into nature. Right. So this is what I like about Nietzsche. So Nietzsche will say that that artists are only artists in so far as they do what nature already does when it creates canyons and emeralds and flowers and whatever, which is to say there's a kind of artistic impulse that that that collapses those two.
Yeah. And so when I think about, you know, nature, whatever it is, the natural world stopping to to. to actualize the virtual, that would, I mean, again, human beings are not other than that natural world, right? We are, that's us too. And so I'm not quite sure how to make sense of, but I think your point might be kind of like maybe more sort of a Tim Morton kind of point. Like when nature is, when we think of nature, no, you're shaking your head. Yeah, I know I'm just thinking like, right, so there's all sorts of romantic conceptions of what nature, you know, nature is that thing that's other than human beings, nature is that thing that, you know, that, or in the sort of modernist way, nature is that thing that provides a set of resources for human, you know, endeavors, etc.
But if we think of a kind of naturalism, of the philosophical naturalism of the kind that I endorse, then the distinction between nature and culture, what we do and what nature, so-called non-human nature does, these things are on par with one another. It's a continuum, I think. Yeah, I mean, like my point is that because of the technology, sometimes we cannot have the experience of what is natural, right? right for example i had i had a piece i had the commission to write the piece of violin right and i mean who writes the solo violin now so i had like this idea of i bent you know i worked with some scientists here at mit and harvard to just use some electrodes that you connect them with the neurons okay so you basically record the sounds of the neurons through computers instead
of like pulling the violin right so the the whole thing thing is idea of like how violin can like change the sound of the neurons instead of the sound coming out of the wiring comes out of the body right but then i came home and i started analyzing the sound and i found out that track i can create this sound with the ponticello and like a filter easily and it would be exactly the same thing right so but it's very different experience when i experience it myself with the electrodes right so as long as that i can buy like hundreds of these electrodes and machine and added to every single audience they might have the same kind of experience but if it's just somebody sitting on the stage and doing the same thing it has no it is not different from just me actually doing this this whole thing with just one feature and one sound you know so that's basically that's
that's what i'm referring to is like a big pop yeah yeah i hear you i hear you yeah yeah um Yeah. I mean, I think about that to the degree that I, you know, I don't know how it, right. So imagine like the sound of neurons firing, you're like, well, that's just, you know, basically sounds like a cello, right? Because sound is sound. It doesn't, and of course you can say, no, no, no, it's not. It's sources such and such. But in the end, what the ear receives is, you know, and it's also loaded with all those cultural associations. Yeah, that's interesting. That's fascinating. Yeah. Other questions, comments, remarks, criticisms?
If not, then maybe you, Christoph, have some final remarks. We have like three minutes. Yeah. I don't have general final remarks except to say that I think when I look at the series, I'm curious, at the beginning of our session, Jakob mentioned your essays, right? And I'm just wondering, looking at this great series of people that you've heard from, and I guess you'll hear from two more. I'm really curious. I'm just curious where, what's going to come out of that for all of you. I mean, I know that all of you, you know,
all of you come to this course with interests, sonic interests and conceptual interests and theoretical interests, but I'm just really curious what, and anyway, feel free to share any of that work with me because I just love to see what you're doing. It's a really, it's a fantastic series and and i love the various the various perspectives that i imagine you've been you've you've been brought to you in this whatever it is 10 weeks or something like that so um yeah and if you have any questions or thoughts for me feel free to reach out i mean i'll just i'll put my um i'll put my email address which is easy to find but um i'll just put it in the chat um um feel free to reach me and send me anything of yours or ask for anything from me.
I'm happy to share with you whatever. So, yeah. Cool. And thanks for your time. I appreciate it. It's great to talk with people about this cool stuff. Yeah, thanks a lot, Christoph. It's been really amazing today and also from all the presenters, some really good questions um like we have thoughts for many other sessions um and i totally agree with you that i'm very curious about what will be the end products if they are written or the audio essays i really hope that we can make a a good radio program in the end for for those who who want to do that and that will be broadcasted online and and also saved as a podcast so or maybe Maybe several podcasts, depends on how many people are doing that.
Yeah. So thanks a lot for your lecture. Yeah. Thank you so much, Christian. That was wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks to all of you and stay in touch. And thanks, Jakob. Thanks. Cool. Thank you.