Digital Artifact

My Proposals for the Future of Sounds were published in Digital Artifact Magazine Issue 3: We Made This For You Out Of Nothing.

The proposals were originally posted on the blog HERE.

Tasks

Why not re-structure and more closely examine various philosophical and linguistic approaches to sound. Below are a set of incomplete tasks and unanswered questions that might arise in relation to that re-structuring:

1. Examine the ways of hearing.
2. Discover rhythm (and secondarily melody) as sources of mimetic/empathetic experience. These musical elements engage the most primal ways of learning and interacting: imitation.
3. Take responsibility for the implications of performance. What is worth rejecting and protecting about a concert experience? Is musical performance necessarily indoctrination?
4. Admit to persona. Decide on (create) its meaning.
5. In musical contexts, explore the distinguishing qualities of prose, dialogue, narration, poetry, and lyrics.
6. Re-examine the word “experimental.” What status quo does it imply? What status quo can the idea of “experimentation” engender?
7. To what extent has inherited (evolved) neural “wiring” pre-determined a relationship to sound? In music, does the familiar only validate or does it create space for transformation?
8. In what ways do the digital music “revolution” de- and re-commodify music? How is the composer implicated? How does the role of composer transform?
9. Where does unamplified acoustic sound stand in relation to:

• Networked culture
• Simulated (virtual) experience
• Cellular and video communication
• mp3 (musical) culture
• Nano-technology
• Space travel

10. Examine the “processing” that happens to sound through every channel:

• amplification
• pirating
• distribution
• documentation
• studio production
• mixing
• mastering
• sharing
• marketing
• performance
• verbal/written critique
• repeated listening
• podcasts/radio/downloads
• co-opting
• sampling
• scoring/transcribing/arranging

Audio Surveillance
and the Phono-Centric Fabulousness of Tom Levin

photo cred

1. "Audio-Surveillance in Narrative Film manifests as a narrative excess"
Which as I understand it means that the depiction of surveillance in film, creates a network of possibilities for the viewer/characters. The collection, storing, manipulation, use, misuse, and erasure of the collected data becomes an undepicted but revlevant "excess."

2. Listening as Menace.

3. The sound of rewinding = "The materiality of the signifier"

4. Though the representation of digital is not phenomenally accessible (we can't perceive the media with our senses) , "I insist on the materiality of the digital" ( and it's nearly impossible to get rid of).

5. Error conditions specific to transcriptions are harnessed to signify specificity of new media. (We have such a bright future of errors and artifacts)

6. "A sign is any thing that can be used to lie." - Umberto Eco

7. Tom views himself a working for the "Production of surveillant literacy"

8. Shape Your Data Shadow

9. I'm watched therefore I am.

10. A short history of voicemail.

50 Proposals for the Future of Sounds

Martin Puryear “Plenty's Boast”

1. A digital recording is a score, performed by trained and partially equipped experiencers.

2. New bots inhabit the spaces between samples. They communicate to one another the absences and potentials alluded to by a moment of media.

3. Inter–disciplinary gave way to anti-disciplinary fades into post-disciplinary erased by the inconceivable volume of communicative possibilities.

4. One moment (in multitudes) of sound: so loud that every mobile Malleus (hammer) on earth flexes in honor of the experiment

5. Sample rate so rapid that the time each bit inhabits has been warped by the speed necessary to collect its binary name.

6. Immerse the public in Perilymph.

7. Chemical composition determines resonance. The composer is a chemist.

8. Emotional resonance is the body’s unwillingness to relinquish expressive decisions to the brain.

9. The network, starts as a string (cable). Becomes a web. Becomes a porous fabric. Becomes a metallic sheet. Becomes a dense compression of strata. Becomes a living skin inhabited by emerged consciousness.

10. The network has wildlife. Predators, Prey, Parasites, Fauna, Sickness, Herbs.

11. Design is Disease. Disease is Mutation. Mutation is Design.

12. Learn to understand memory by depleting/processing your material possessions.

13. I believe in emptiness, vibration and electricity.

14. Isolate the ingredients for your projects. Molecules, Cells, Atoms, Consciousness.

15. Dark matter is a musical frontier.

16. Space travel is inhabiting sound on pause.

17. Rhythm is the body. Headphones are disembodiment.

18.Sounds to examine: purchases, energy, children interacting on the network, the oscillation of viral exchange, the afterlife of packaging material, human migration, melting.

19. Designate each person as a sample and derive 37,792 hours of CD quality audio.

20. Screaming is a commodified point of view.

21. Vibration is an elusive business model. Purchasing power is equivalent to memory.

22. Musical creation becomes the output of networked and cybernetically predictive conglomerates. Their objectives fluctuate between arousal, placation and inciting amnesia

23. Atonal and arrhythmic recordings are subjects of anthropological discourse.

24. Isorhythm becomes an affliction.

25. Audio warfare is the subject of congressional hearings in which the public debates sonic cruelty and the woeful of lack of adequate protection for the nation’s citizens and armed forces.

26. Middle Ear nano-receptors revolutionize the memory enhancement and psycho-acoustic capabilities of multi-function cognitive entertainment systems.

27. Neocortical Sound Synthesis programs are officially added to most prenatal and early childhood music curricula.

28. Vibration from city, highway and airport noise is stored and reused via kinetic energy cells.

29. Standardized measuring of personal sound energy flux allows everyone to ascertain his or her own relative (native) receptivity (density) to experimental audio.

30. Teach fractal synthesis, electrical current phrase mimicry, breath/pulse listening, audiosomatic pain reduction, “hearing things” as composition, and sonic turmoil.

31. Post-Digital is the frontier in which ones and zeros (quantum particles) exhibit predictive behavior.

32. Bruises are bodily reverberations of compacted/inertial sound.

33. Sounds to examine: Vocal and cerebral activity during prayer, the oscillation of public opinion, internal organ noise of grain fed livestock, bacterial evolution, the numerical resonance of economic collapse.

34. Develop a new theory of musical pleasure based on perceived hype, redundancy, and novelty.

35. As a composer, expect emotional and critical sublimation from your audience.

36. Sensory dissonance on the basilar membrane (inner ear) is a widely accepted technique in popular/commercial music.

37. Auditory hallucinogenic drugs are delivered illicitly on personal music players.

38. Drum machines develop cybernetic (organic) personality.

39. Rhythm regains lifespan.

40. After the unification of Physics, composers work to make the world of quantum mechanics audible (popular).

41. Musical Nano-Drugs, which allow adults to enjoy their children’s music, are commercially available. Bots benignly invade the auditory cortex and install the neuron structures of your choice.

42. Absolute Pitch, Environmental Mute Function, Hearing Reinstatement, and Earshot Extension, are all available commercially.

43. Sound comes from the brain’s evolutionary need to fictionalize (embellish) vibration.

44. Pitch is an invented linguistic outgrowth of sound.

45. Music is a longstanding human accident (adornment) in which the brain rewards itself, and the body, for it own accomplishment and discovery.

46. Noise is a constructed regret. Fake.

47. Rhythm, as a structure, is the (a) fundamental unit of life and physical organization.

48. The composer is measured against the possibility of visceral ecstasy. She is loaded down with the failures and Gnostic wisdom of tradition. She is able to conjure and deaden. She is never taught what is available, but it is still available.

49. Recording: initially the instatement of illusionistic reverberation into the seat of authentic experience. It inaugurated a colonial structure onto the haphazard economy of musical experience and experimentation. Recording turned on itself and became the subject of it’s own gaze (colonization). Recording became wilderness anew. It seeped into the ground.

50. Music is the human effort to civilize air.

Animal Feet, Infra-Sound, and The Destruction of Humanity?



I had a wonderful discussion w/ James Rouvelle about his ideas on human disconnection from the earth.

1. Animals communicate w/ infrasound using the bottom of their feet.
2. Amphibians and other low lying creatures use their jaws as we use the tympanum in our ear.
3. Humans (w/ shoes, buildings, pavement) systematically disconnect ourselves from the surface/vibrations of the earth.
4. We are inventing our demise all the while we have an uncanny capacity to contemplate it.
5. Humans work to make everything known, Artists can conserve the unknown.
6. Parable of the elephant and the blind men
7. A gesture of expression helps illuminate the whole elephant.
8. Cultivate Empathy?
9. The Architecture of Teranobu Fujimori
10. What's wrong with the bees? Not cell phones but possibly GMOs
11. What will cull the Human herd? Probably a lack of something very basic (food/water) rather than a catostrophic event.
12. Robot Animals.