Low End Theory

Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience

Paul C. Jasen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781501335914
• eBook ISBN: 9781501309953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Low End Theory probes the much-mythologized field of bass and low-frequency sound. It begins in music but quickly moves far beyond, following vibratory phenomena across time, disciplines and disparate cultural spheres (including hauntings, laboratories, organ workshops, burial mounds, sound art, studios, dancefloors, infrasonic anomalies, and a global mystery called The Hum). Low End Theory asks what it is about bass that has fascinated us for so long and made it such a busy site of bio-technological experimentation, driving developments in science, technology, the arts, and religious culture. The guiding question is not so much what we make of bass, but what it makes of us: how does it undulate and unsettle; how does it incite; how does it draw bodily thought into new equations with itself and its surroundings? Low End Theory is the first book to survey this sonorous terrain and devise a conceptual language proper to it. With its focus on sound's structuring agency and the multi-sensory aspects of sonic experience, it stands to make a transformative contribution to the study of music and sound, while pushing scholarship on affect, materiality, and the senses into fertile new territory. Through energetic and creative prose, Low End Theory works to put thought in touch with the vibratory encounter as no scholarly book has done before. For more information, visit: http://www.lowendtheorybook.com/

1

The Sonic Body: An Ethico-Acoustic Toolkit

East London, 2005: When bass wafted from the speaker cabinets, the air became thicker, heavier. Abrupt silences seemed to produce a vacuum effect. Most on the dancefloor just swayed with the shifts in pressure and vibration: the outward stillness of bodies danced by sound. Separated from the rest of the club by a heavy black curtain, the space was almost totally dark, leaving thoughts to focus on sound and sensation. Different tones drew different responses from various parts of my body – a chill, hums up the oesophagus, weight in the abdomen, shimmers over the skin – but the pressure in my chest was almost incessant. I could release it, I learned, by opening my mouth, although I wasn’t always sure if I was breathing in, out, or at all. This confusion was intensified by textures designed to evoke the sound of respiration – synthetic gasps, strained exhalations, the room as rickety iron lung. Throughout the event, my nostrils fluttered and my vision blurred. I was buoyed, pulled, pummelled. Sped up, slowed down. Too much to grasp at once: just go with the flow. For long stretches, I could think of little beyond these streams of sonorous interactions, sometimes smiling at a sensation, sometimes nervously anticipating where it might be leading. Here and there, I retreated behind the curtain, half-fearing my eardrums might rupture from within. Entering again, there was a distinct feeling of energy in the dense air. Afterwards, myself and others in our party reported feeling as though we’d been part of a singular vibrating mass, all of us modulated by the same energy cycles, each grappling with the paradox of being made intensely aware of one’s own body at the same time as it seemed to be dissolving into sound. Leaving the club someone handed me a flyer that read: Come meditate on bass weight.¹

A vibratory milieu; a field of sonorous relations shaped by the interactional capacities of volume, frequency, acoustic space, and sentient flesh.² The bass-drenched dancefloor is a laboratory for investigating the asymmetrical effects of low-frequency undulation as it alters the body’s image of itself: tones and impacts felt strongly here, differently there and elsewhere not at all; vibrations that travel across the sensorium as their frequency shifts upwards or down; autonomic responses, anomalous perceptions, questions.³ When bass moves bodies, it puts them at variance with themselves; new inflections of being are sparked in a stream of heterogeneous encounters. When bass permeates and modulates, it binds bodies together (putting them literally on the same wavelength), making the contingency and exteriority of their composition an intuitively felt-reality. The sonic body begins in material vibration, but it is always potentially the start of something more: an incitement to thought, movement, collective transformation. It is a transducer through which the bio-physical conditions of sonic experience are converted into various sonic-cultural trajectories (tales, experiments, strategies). Attending to it therefore entails an ontological shift and the engineering of new concepts informed by the sonorous fields they aim to address. It also forces a rethinking of some basic terms that are easily taken for granted. Body, subject and sonic experience all mean different things in a field of immanence.

Sonorous relations

We do not have experience so much as we are engendered by it, continuously. How, Deleuze challenged, could a subject transcend the always-recomposing relations that constitute its world? In this monist conception, experience does not arrive from outside to be mediated by an already determined subject. Rather, it is understood in its exteriority, as a field of intensities. It is a relational milieu, its shape and tendencies derived from the affects chaotically circulating therein.⁴ But if the field in its totality is chaotic, it is also given to localized patterning, as idiosyncratic agglomerations (consistencies) emerge from its intensive rhythms.⁵ The subject, in relation to experience, is therefore better understood as a trajectory, reshaped over and over through the infolding of heterogeneous intensities. This entering into composition with difference is key because newness can only emerge through relations of dynamic imbalance – a heterogenesis rather than a homogenesis.⁶ There is no opening for the new in a world in which experience is always already prefigured in human culture. Here, it is important to remember that the French expérience means both ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’, and Deleuze and Guattari fully intend the pun. The experiential field is a zone of experimentation – of probing, intuiting, following, adjusting. It is in this sense that the material encounter with difference is also an incitement to thought and an opportunity for invention.

‘Something in the world forces us to think,’ Deleuze argues. ‘This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter [which] may be grasped in a range of affective tones’.⁷ These ‘encounters’ are what Deleuze calls events. Events are the texture of experience. If experience is a field of immanent potentials, events are the instances of affective modification that differentiate it. They are the routes along which that potential is converted into qualities of lived reality, opening traffic between the virtual (what may be) and the actual (what is) or, in bodily terms, between the incorporeal (what a body can do) and the corporeal (the effective reality of a body). As instances of differentiation, produced through fleeting, contingent relations between divergent trajectories, events are considered singular and unrepeatable (The same act ‘repeated’ is always, in fact, singular, because the circumstances of its unfolding can never be exactly the same as before or after.). Events thus have an individuating effect, in the sense that they channel the unformed intensities of experience into specific, new qualities of a given lived reality. In these ways, then, events are also necessarily future-oriented, involving anticipation and the emergence of new modes of being and interacting. To grasp an ‘affective tone’ is to feel inklings of what-might-come-to-be, to sense tendencies, however discordant, that suffuse a given encounter.

From this, we can say that a synonym for the sonic body would be the body as acoustic event: the parallel modulation of flesh and thought in sonically-led self-variation. This eventness of the body, in general terms, has been theorized by Brian Massumi. Although sound does not figure prominently in his work, his depiction of the traffic between sensation and culture carries an acoustic connotation that makes it especially helpful to the present discussion. The relationship, he argues, is one of resonance (a term which will recur with various implications in the following chapters). Resonance is a phenomenon of affection at a distance, involving transduction and a modulating-together, as the affected body takes on the energetic properties of the affecting one. Between them, there is not a void but a ‘dynamic unity’, a field of rhythmic intensities, feedbacks and emergent tendencies:

With the body, the ‘walls’ are sensory surfaces. The intensity is experience. The emptiness or in-betweeness filled by experience is the incorporeal dimension of the body referred to earlier. The conversion of surface distance into intensity is also the conversion of the materiality of the body into an event. It is a relay between the corporeal and incorporeal dimensions. This is not yet a subject. But it may well be the conditions of emergence of a subject: an incipient subjectivity. Call it a ‘self-.’ The hyphen is retained as a reminder that ‘self’ is not a substantive but rather a relation. Sorting out ‘self-reflexivity,’ ‘self-referentiality,’ and self-relation’ and, in the process, distributing subjectivity and its incipiency along the nature-culture continuum, becomes another major theoretical stake.⁸

The last point is an important one because it allows for traffic in both directions: becomings-cultural of nature and becomings-nature of culture. It is neither mediation nor determinism, but mutual modulation, and the eventness of the body is a conduit of these resonances.

Returning to sound, we can speak of: a becoming-sonic of the body; its conceptual dimension in attendant becomings-in-thought; these in their multiplicity as new trajectories of subjectivation (the self- of a sonorous relation); and those in their collective form as the emergence of a ‘people’. ‘Every becoming’, Deleuze and Guattari argue, ‘is a block of coexistence’, an experiential milieu.⁹ They use the term to describe an affective relation through which apparent wholeness and fixity are broken down (deterritorialized, or we can say spectralized) and potentials inherent in that relation are brought to life (the virtual/incorporeal made actual/corporeal). Becomings are, therefore, always a becoming-other, the fallout of the dynamic imbalance that characterizes the encounter with difference. The implication is not that a total, molar transformation occurs (we do not literally turn into a sound wave).¹⁰ Nor is a becoming-sonic a matter of imitation or metaphor (i.e. play-acting or ‘mere’ discourse), and this distinction illustrates the difference between mediation and modulation.¹¹ Where sound and body interact, we can speak of ‘an inhumanity immediately experienced in the body as such.’¹² It is a process of transduction, the sounding of a mind-body and a taking-on – even non-consciously or unwillingly – of certain affects of the impinging force.

In this way, we can say that powerful, low-frequency sound not only participates in culture, it has a material agency that can play an organizing role, putting matters of human agency and subject–object relations in question.¹³ Here, a soccer analogy borrowed by Massumi from Pierre Levy is helpful. From Levy, he develops a notion of ‘collective individuation around a catalyzing point’,¹⁴ or the emergence of a collectivity through shared experience, and the simultaneous internal differentiation of that group through the singular events that texture it. In the case of soccer, the field is the experiential milieu. Without it, there is no game. The game is organized by two polar attractors – the goals – which establish a directional tension according to which events will unfold. Ground, goals and bodies are inducers of play, while ‘the ball catalyses it’. The ball is the object and focus of the game through which energies are channelled in the production of the event:

The ball arrays the teams around itself. Where and how it bounces differentially potentializes and depotentializes the entire field, intensifying and deintensifying the exertions of the players and the movements of the team. The ball is the subject of the play. To be more precise, the subject of the play is the displacements of the ball and continual modifications of the field of potential those displacements effect.

So the ball is part-subject. It ‘catalyses the play as a whole but is not itself a whole.’ It ‘moves the players.’ If the ball is part-subject, then the player is part-object. Now the spectral aspect emerges: ‘The ball does not address the player as a whole. It addresses the player’s eyes, ears and touch through separate sensory channels … [which are] synthesized into an actionability.’ In effect, it breaks a body down (its habit, organization) and draws a newly reconceptualized one forth. Deleuze called this the body without organs (not a denial of corporeality but recognition of its provisionality). ‘No organ is constant,’ he argued. Rather they are called into new contingent organizations through their encounters.¹⁵ Those encounters channel the asymmetrical pull of the virtual which is grasped in shifts of affective tone.

If we substitute the soccer ball for a bassline, a beat, an industrial hum, a singing cave, a singing iceberg, an organ blast, an infrasonic ‘presence’, an oscillating unknown ..., we can begin to imagine many ways in which low-frequency sound can function as the ‘catalyzing point’, organizing a collective sonic body as it modulates the intensities of the experiential milieu. It catalyses sonic becomings. This material agency is real, in the blocks of coexistence it engenders, whether the encounter is intentionally sought (as in a dance), unwilled (e.g. the effects of a sonic weapon) or even non-conscious (as can be the case with infrasound).¹⁶ And these relations are ethical ones, in the Spinoza-Deleuze sense, of bodies affecting one another and increasing or diminishing each other’s capacities to act along various axes.

When elements of style are introduced to the interaction, we enter a territory which Guattari labelled the ethico-aesthetic. Style is understood here not in a categorical sense akin to genre, nor in the spectacular sense familiar to cultural studies. Rather, it refers to operations done in the shaping, channelling and intensification of experience. It means finding new heterogenic rhythms and strategies for rupturing common sensibility.¹⁷ More than just a means to an end, though, an ethico-aesthetics is the application of style to a modulation of affect. Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm most directly refers to art practice, as such, but it has much wider implications.¹⁸ On the soccer field, for example, Massumi calls style the freeness and ‘modulatory actions’ that play with and around rules, differently ‘skew[ing] the potential movements composing the field’.¹⁹ In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Elements of a Myth-Science
• 1 The Sonic Body: An Ethico-Acoustic Toolkit
• 2 Spectral Catalysis: Disquieting Encounters
• 3 Numinous Strategies
• 4 Tone Scientists I: Vibratory Arts
• 5 Tone Scientists II: Bass Cults
• Conclusion: Where next?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright