Untitled - alejandro casales

224 Pages·2006·1.42 MB·English

Sound Ideas
Edited by
Sandra Buckley
Michael Hardt
Brian Massumi
27 Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience Aden Evens
...UNCONTAINED
26 Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat Peter C. van Wyck
25 Trust Alphonso Lingis
BY
24 Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living Richard Doyle
23 Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed William E. Connolly
THE
22 Globalizing AIDS Cindy Patton
21 Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx,
DISCIPLINES,
Conrad in Crisis Cesare Casarino
20 Means without End: Notes on Politics Giorgio Agamben
INSUBORDINATE
19 The Invention of Modern Science Isabelle Stengers
18 Methodologies of the Oppressed Chela Sandoval
17 Proust and Signs: The Complete Text Gilles Deleuze
16 Deleuze: The Clamor of Being Alain Badiou PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE
15 Insurgencies: Constituent Power and
the Modern State Antonio Negri ...Inventing,
14 When Pain Strikes Bill Burns, Cathy Busby, and Kim Sawchuk, editors
excessively,
13 Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and
the Pragmatics of the “Outside” Cary Wolfe in the between...
12 The Metamorphoses of the Body José Gil
11 The New Spinoza Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, editors
10 Power and Invention: Situating Science Isabelle Stengers
PROCESSES
9 Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity Ira Livingston
8 Becoming-Woman Camilla Griggers
7 A Potential Politics: Radical Thought in Italy
7 Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, editors
6 Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time Éric Alliez
OF
5 The Year of Passages Réda Bensmaïa
4 Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
3 Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons Eric Michaels
2 The Cinematic Body Steven Shaviro
1 The Coming Community Giorgio Agamben HYBRIDIZATION
Sound Ideas
Music, Machines, and Experience
Aden Evens
Theory out of Bounds Volume 27
UniversityofMinnesotaPress
Minneapolis • London
An earlier version of chapter 1 was originally published as “Sound Ideas,”
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature24, no. 3 (September 1977; special edition edited by Brian Massumi),
and reprinted in Brian Massumi, ed., A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari
(New York: Routledge, 2002). The first half of chapter 3 resembles a previously published essay,
“The Question Concerning the Digital,” differences 14, no. 2 (Summer 2003; special edition,
More on Humanism,edited by Elizabeth Weed and Ellen Rooney); published by Duke University Press.
Copyright 2005 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted,
in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without
the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Evens, Aden.
Sound ideas : music, machines, and experience / Aden Evens.
p. cm. — (Theory out of bounds ; v. 27)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN0-8166-4536-1 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN0-8166-4537-X (pb : alk. paper)
1. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. 2. Music and technology.
I. Title. II. Series.
ML3800.E87 2005
780'.1—dc22
2005002025
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my dad, who loves music and thinking.
Technology, not so much.
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Chapter 1. Sound and Noise 1
Chapter 2. Sound and Time 26
Chapter 3. Sound and Digits 62
Chapter 4. Making Music 126
Notes 175
Works Cited 193
Index 197
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Preface
a guy from whom I was ordering a sandwich noticed the book I was carrying.
“Why write about music?” he asked. “Music is for grooving. You can’t say anything
about it that makes any difference.”
In spite of its anti-intellectual motivation, I found myself agree-
ing with this claim frequently over the course of writing this book. Music resists
theorization at every step. As a form of art that is set in time, that takes its time, a
piece of music does not sit still to be observed. One cannot subject sound to a persis-
tent observation; rather, one can only listen and then, maybe, listen again. Music is
apprehended in chunks of time. Partly because sound is dynamic, Western intellec-
tual traditions show a marked preference for vision as the figure of knowledge. We
articulate more effectively the fixed image than the dynamic sound.
Traditional studies of music surmount this difficulty by a variety
of routes. First, musicology—centered on European art music—tends to focus on the
score, the written representation of a piece of music. The score offers itself to the
focusedgaze of the musicologist, and its abstract representations can be read and ana-
lyzed using the practiced techniques of textual interpretation. Second, the burgeoning
discipline of cultural studies examines music in a culture and so emphasizes cultural
artifacts and cultural dynamics in its study. Both of these fields yield much of inter-
est, but both suffer from the same “oversight.” For neither musicology nor cultural