Sonic Affects: Experimental Electronic Music in Sound Art, Cinema, and Performance

236 Pages·2015·0.94 MB·English

UCLA
UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Sonic Affects: Experimental Electronic Music in Sound Art, Cinema, and Performance
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dj8t9dc
Author
Hutson, William Moran
Publication Date
2015

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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University of California
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles
Sonic Affects:
Experimental Electronic Music
in Sound Art, Cinema,
and Performance
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in Theater and Performance Studies
by
William Moran Hutson
2015

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Sonic Affects:
Experimental Electronic Music
in Sound Art, Cinema,
and Performance
by
William Moran Hutson
Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies
University of California, Los Angeles, 2015
Professor Sue-Ellen Case, Co-Chair
Professor Timothy D. Taylor, Co-Chair
The last decade has witnessed an increase in scholarly attention paid to experimental
electronic music, especially the subgenres of sound art and noise music. Numerous books,
articles, and conferences have taken up these topics as objects of study. However, only a small
amount of that work has focused on the music’s relationship to affect, identification, and cultural
history. There remains in some disciplines an assumption that examples of experimental
electronic music are either dryly formal demonstrations of art-for-art’s-sake, or essentially
resistant to legibility and meaning. The more “abstract” and “difficult” a piece appears on first
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glance, the more likely it will be seen to retreat from social and political concerns. This
dissertation considers specific works of experimental electronic music through the lenses of
affect theory, performance studies, sound studies, cultural studies, and other related approaches
to argue for a perspective that more thoroughly accounts for the human in the electronic.
The dissertation’s case studies are selected from a variety of different media. Chapter 1
addresses four historically significant works of sound art that each take a technological or
physical property of sound as a guiding compositional principle. The chapter considers the ways
these pieces can be heard to signify beyond their “modernist” strategies with attention both to the
affective experiences of hearing the works, and the sociopolitical contexts of their creation.
Chapter 2 outlines a selective history of noise music through the vacillation between opposing
poles of “noise” and “music.” The chapter contains a sustained analysis of Macronympha’s
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1995) that investigates the titular city’s deindustrialization and the
affects of anger and disappointment that animate the album’s representations of “white trash”
masculinity. Chapter 3 examines diegetic appearances of experimental electronic music in two
films—Lipstick (1976), and Bewildered Youth (1957)—in which the music is made to signify
sexual perversion and criminality. Using Susan McClary’s notion of gendered structures in
western tonal music, I argue that, in these cases, music that rejects tonality becomes
characterized by a failure to adequately perform “normal” gender. Finally, Chapter 4 engages
examples of extreme performance art with a particular focus on the significance of recorded
audio in the documentation of John Duncan’s Blind Date (1980). All four chapters prioritize
close readings of audio compositions to interrogate the dense bundles of affect and meaning they
generate.

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The dissertation of William Moran Hutson is approved.
Susan Leigh Foster
Sean Metzger
Sue-Ellen Case, Co-Chair
Timothy D. Taylor, Co-Chair
University of California, Los Angeles
2015

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vita vi
Introduction: Sonic Affects 1
Chapter 1: Affect and Space in Sound Art 33
Chapter 2: Noise and Music in an Underground Art Subculture 83
Chapter 3: Sexuality, Fear and Diegetic Music in Film 139
Chapter 4: Sound and Documentation in Extreme Performance 187
Works Cited 217
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VITA
Education
BA, Theater

University of California, Los Angeles December 2004
Publications
“Max Neuhaus’s Times Square and the Production of Sound and Space” Digital Art Criticism
No. 2, November 2012. Print.
Teaching Experience
As Instructor:
“Sound Studies for Theater Sound Designers” Spring 2014
Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles
“Monsters and the Uncanny in American Popular Culture” Summer 2012, 2013
Department of American Studies, University of California, Berkeley
As Teaching Assistant:
“History of American Theater and Drama” Spring 2015
Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles
“Reconstructing Theatrical Past” Winter 2015
Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles
“Acting and Performance in Film” Fall, Winter, Spring 2009-2013
Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles
“Race in American Popular Music” Summer 2010, 2011
Department of American Studies, University of California, Berkeley
“Shopping in America” Summer 2011
Department of American Studies, University of California, Berkeley

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“The Age of Monopoly: America from Reconstruction to The Great Depression” Summer 2010
Department of American Studies, University of California, Berkeley
“Race in American Cinema” Summer 2010
Department of American Studies, University of California, Berkeley
As Guest Lecturer:
“Reconstructing Theatrical Past” Winter 2015
Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles
“Advanced Sound Design for Theater” Winter 2013
Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles
“Background of Theatrical Art” Winter 2013
Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles
Conference Participation
“Abrasive Nostalgia: A Noisescape of Deindustrialization” EMP Pop Conference, New York
University, March 2012.
Journal Manuscript Review
Computers in Entertainment, 2012.
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Introduction: Sonic Affects
For twenty-eight days in 2012, performance artists Bryan Lewis Saunders plugged his
ears, held a funnel in his mouth, and attempted to hear the world exclusively through the
vibrations in his skull and body. Titled The Third Ear Experiment, Saunders’s performance
enacted the following instructional score:
1. Insert wax earplugs into both ears.
2. Smear petroleum jelly around the inside of the ear.
3. Gently press a cotton ball into the ear.
4. Wrap ears with tape, sealing the contents within.
5. Put sound isolation headphones on.
6. Attach a copper funnel to your mouth.
As you deny the ability to hear with your external ears, sound is redirected and
heard through the inside of your mouth. Immediately, the noises of your own
body moving around in the world grow overwhelmingly loud. Shortly thereafter,
you begin to hear with your third ear (2012)1
Saunders documented this performance with written descriptions of the sounds he felt, as well as
through drawings and paintings of himself that visualize the sonic experiences he was enduring.
For Saunders, the piece is as much an example of sound art as it is performance art, even though
he was the only person in a position to hear the piece.
The Third Ear Experiment foregrounds hearing as a physical experience and proposes an
understanding of sound as an ever-present vibratory field, insisting that the sonic consists of a
constant flux of resonances and oscillations that are felt in the body as well as heard by the ear.
1 Saunders’s documentation of this piece can be accessed at http://bryanlewissaunders.org/weblog/2012/sep/19/third-
ear-experiment/.
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