Sonic Writing

Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions

Thor Magnusson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501313882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Sonic Writing explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media. Studying the domains of instrument design, musical notation, and sound recording under the rubrics of material, symbolic, and signal inscriptions of sound, the book describes how these historical techniques of sonic writing are implemented in new digital music technologies. With a scope ranging from ancient Greek music theory, medieval notation, early modern scientific instrumentation to contemporary multimedia and artificial intelligence, it provides a theoretical grounding for further study and development of technologies of musical expression. The book draws a bespoke affinity and similarity between current musical practices and those from before the advent of notation and recording, stressing the importance of instrument design in the study of new music and projecting how new computational technologies, including machine learning, will transform our musical practices. Sonic Writing offers a richly illustrated study of contemporary musical media, where interactivity, artificial intelligence, and networked devices disclose new possibilities for musical expression. Thor Magnusson provides a conceptual framework for the creation and analysis of this new musical work, arguing that contemporary sonic writing becomes a new form of material and symbolic design--one that is bound to be ephemeral, a system of fluid objects where technologies are continually redesigned in a fast cycle of innovation.

Part I

Material Inscriptions

1

Instrumentality

What is a musical instrument? We might agree on a basic definition that a musical instrument is an object that produces sound. This would include human-made as well as natural objects. Any found object could be turned into an instrument, so this also includes objects made for other purposes, say wine glasses, sirens, firecrackers, or typewriters. Such a definition supports Wittgenstein’s description of how words gain their meaning through their use (Wittgenstein 1968), and we can extend that to say that things also gain their function from their use. In Cockney slang, “tea leaf” stands for a “thief” and a “fatboy slim” for a “gym,” and likewise a beer bottle can transform into an ashtray, a flute, or a bottleneck slide for a guitar.

In 1933, musicologist Eric von Hornbostel proposed a broad definition of musical instruments: “For the purposes of research everything must count as a musical instrument with which sound can be produced intentionally” (Hornbostel 1933: 129). This is a good definition, wide and inclusive, the only problem being that musical ideas have changed since the 1930s, and now intentionality is not a necessary prerequisite when making music. The music of John Cage from the latter half of the twentieth century corroborates that. We might also question whether musical instruments necessarily need to generate sound. There are conceptual instruments, as Douglas Kahn has shown (Kahn 2014); there are instruments in the form of ideas, as the concept artists of the 1970s can demonstrate; and then there are imaginary instruments, or “fictophones,” as curated in Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson’s Museum of Imaginary Instruments.¹ Put simply: anything can be a musical instrument if framed as such. In The Tangible in Music, Marko Aho provides a definition of musical instruments based on Bielawski’s notion of instruments as transformers of movement into sound, here transducing bodily gestures in physical time and space into musical gestures in musical time and space (Aho 2016: 29). Music and movement have always been inseparable, and in some cultures there is no distinction between music and dance: it is one and the same thing. But we need to be careful, because if human movement transduced into sound becomes central in the definition of instrumentality we need to consider less physical modes of performance, say Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer, which uses a brain interface to generate the sound (where the only performative movement is brain activity), or live coding performances, where code becomes the body of the instrument, and the primary visible movement, or gesture–sound relationship, are dancing letters on the projected screen. There is clearly body and movement in both of these examples, and our definition needs to encompass such practices too.

Musical organa

Having established that a hammer might be a musical instrument when used for the purpose of generating sound in a musical context, we might then ask wherein lies the difference between an instrument and a tool? Ignoring the etymological roots of the two words (one being Latin and the other Germanic), we can, of course, say that the guitar is a tool for creating sounds, but there is a universal agreement that for nuanced expression we use the term “instrument.” Instruments are tools for delicate work or precise perception. They extend our bodily capacity through their power of amplifying and reifying both impression and expression. Scientific instruments are typically designed to extend our senses, for example through the telescope or microscope, or with tools that measure weight, analyse materials, or sense magnetism. Economic instruments involve the fine-tuning of monetary flow, exemplified by changing interest rates, taxes, prices of services and goods, etc. Similarly, musical instruments tune our emotional moods, inspire, and vitalise, as they extend our capacity to express ourselves beyond language, in sound, as material extensions or prostheses of our bodies. Unlike tools that serve as a medium for making a particular task easier, such as hammering a nail (which can be done with a rock or any solid object), musical instruments are more than mere media for the transmission of a message or achieving an end goal: they are an end in themselves. The harp, the bagpipe, or the synthesizer are not there to make certain tasks simpler for us, nor are they substitutes for anything else; they constitute the meaning of their play through their expressive nature.

If instruments are primarily seen as technological extensions of our bodies, an etymological investigation into the origin of the word “instrument” should be helpful. The Latin term instrumentum derives from instruere, which means to arrange, furnish, equip, or instruct something. To set into place. The instrument is a means, a medium, for action, a tool. The Latin term has the Greek equivalent in organon, which signifies equally a bodily organ, a tool, and a musical instrument. Deriving from ergon (from which the English word “work” can be traced, and which we explored in the introduction) as “to do” or affect something, the organon is a part of the body, and in the form of technical instruments, extensions of the body: thus prosthetic. For Aristotle, in the Physics, the organon is that which mediates the motion between the mover (the doer) and the moved (the deed). For the Greeks, musical instruments were organa, amongst other tools and implements. The word organon was also used in Latin, and Galileo, for example, used the word “organum” for his newly invented telescope. We might, therefore, entertain a definition of musical instruments as any sonic system with which we extend mind and bodies, requiring the practise of refined movements, with the purpose of making music. To complete this etymological survey here, the word “organology” thus means the study of musical instruments. It has been used since the late nineteenth century for this purpose, appearing during a period when colonialists began to bring exotic instruments to Europe, which, mixed with a nascent museum and scientific culture, resulted in the analysis, categorisation, and preservation of musical objects from around the world.

Here is an experiment: close your eyes and think of musical instruments. And again: close your eyes and think of music technology. Having done this experiment with various people in different countries in the past two years, the results tend to be the same everywhere: musical instruments include guitars, violins, clarinets, trumpets, pianos, and percussion. And music technologies include mixers, screens, software, and all kinds of plastic controllers with knobs, sliders, and rubber pads. We can ask ourselves: why it is that the results are so binary and distinctive? The piano is a sophisticated piece of music technology, and a MIDI controller can form part of an expressive musical instrument. The answer is clearly cultural and deeply embedded in practice, but it involves the standardisation of the technological elements of acoustic instruments to serve mass production. Most acoustic instruments gained their final form in the late nineteenth century and have evolved very little since. They are the result of an industrialisation and professionalisation process that also cemented the roles of the composer, conductor, instrumentalist, instrument maker, recording engineer, record label, publisher, concert organisers, venues, technicians, reviewers, media publishers, radio and TV programmes. Related to this formal definition of roles, the evolution of musical instruments stagnated in the nineteenth century, a process Simondon calls “concretisation,” or when a technology stabilises and becomes a standard (Simondon 2017). This also relates to how digital music technologies belong to a much larger techno-social change in which large swathes of human activities are transformed to fit work-processes introduced by the digital computer. Another contributing factor would be how, since the 1980s, the word “technology” has practically become a synonym for everything “digital”.

Instruments in myth and philosophy

The function and meaning of musical instruments change over time in the diverse musical cultures of the world. Since this book focuses on digital musical technology, there is not much space for ethnomusicological organology, or how instrumental technologies and practices have been borrowed and appropriated across cultures and continents. Digital music technologies are largely tools of Western musical culture; to explain why this is so would be to probe complex reasons that are beyond the scope of this book. The agenda here is to understand what instruments mean to us currently as a culture, where they come from, and how they manifest in practice in the digital age.

As always, it is a good idea to start with the ancient Greeks. A quick rollercoaster narrative would trace instruments from being the extended organs of the gods in Greek mythology, central to poetry, drama, and dance; through serving as minimal support for the voice in medieval chants, and being effectively banned in some factions of the Christian Reformation; to a more central position in the scientific culture of the Enlightenment. It is evident that musical instruments have always been a particular node of power in our cultural perceptions. If we read mythology, ancient history, and philosophy, or study fine art and photography, instruments are omnipresent in all human cultures at all times. They have served as a vehicle of communication with the gods, as tools for spiritual experiences and revelations, or as precise appliances that give expression to complex inner emotions. They are instruments of the soul, technologies in ritualistic activities, at times freeing people, loosening inhibitions and constraints, especially when connected with the food and drink of public festivities, or with mind-altering substances and trance. Musical instruments have, therefore, often been considered dangerous for conservative powers of all sorts, including the Church in medieval times, Protestant sects, and the contemporary Taliban. There are striking similarities in Plato’s rejection of Dionysian music in the fourth century BCE and the arguments of governments attempting to regulate and control illegal raves in European cities during the 1990s.

The notion that instruments are powerful tools to express an inner life beyond rational discourse, and possess a dangerous potential to disrupt public harmony, can be traced back to ancient Greek mythology. Here instruments are no mere tools, but are an intrinsic part of the cosmology and the correct order of things. While string instruments, such as the kithara, the harp, and the lyre, were precisely tuned to mathematical ratios, representing the heav...