Sonification, Technics, and Phusis

counter)induction performing Applebaum's
The Metaphysics of Notation 

The conference of the International Community of Auditory Display as come to an end, and along with the other organizers, I have been dealing with the administrative clean-up: paying bills, catching up on sleep and generally getting the place put back together. ICAD is an interesting group of scholars, with a broad and varied focus on the use of sound as medium of data display. This years conference was developed around the theme 'Sonic Discourse—Expression through Sound.' Many of the presented papers dealt with the mapping of data from some physical or biological system into the sonic realm, and all the complexities of perception that go with that project.

The concert evening of the conference was in many ways situated within the cracks of this broad project of sonification, alternatively displaying and interrogating processes of mediation hiding out in the technical and scientific discourse, discourses which emphasize the abstract and the empirical. A scientistic narrative of translation can obscure the process of transformation which is at the heart of any sonification— the concert organizers wished to highlight the circumstance of performing or situating these sonifications in the social and rhetorical spaces of concerts and presentations. The works c)i performed called attention to those ways which the basic grammars of performance bring to the surface the transformations inevitably associated with the hermeneutic and technical act of performance and presentation. Works like Mark Appelbaum's The Metaphysics of Notation, which highlights the alternately arbitrary and historical character of notation as an absent presence, or road river and rail of Jorge García del Valle Méndez, which derives musical material from the sound of a Korean temple bell, or Katharina Rosenberger's torsion, which in a very real sense is a sonification of the geometry of spiraling plant stems, or my own work Displacements which detaches the performers from the sounds of their performance through a digital intervention.


(...more after the break)

Merleau-Ponty has suggested that the artist has a particular and perhaps privileged place to explore human perception of other beings, yet can enfold and entwine artist and observer.

“The idios kosmos opens by virtue of vision upon a koinos kosmos; in short, that the same thing is both out there in the world and here in the heart of vision—the same, or, if one prefers a similar thing, but according to an efficacious similarity which is the parent, the genesis, the metamorphosis of Being in his [the artist’s] vision. It is the mountain itself which from out there makes itself seen by the painter; it is the mountain that he interrogates with his gaze.”

– Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception

James Edie, ed. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 166

There is a feel in these questions a useful path toward considerations of the notion of musical material, that locus of endless debate and rancor, and yet something from which we can not get away. Even in those sonifications with the most direct links to physical world cease to be observations when that become the departure point for a technical process of sonification– they become foundational to an approach as potently and as powerfully as Schoenberg's material in all of its avowed historical necessity.

For another project (and because it's summer and so I can), I'm rereading Steigler's Technics and Time, and right in the middle of preparing the concert I came upon this quote:

Modern technics inflicts violence upon phusis [that most basic determination of being as growth or bringing-itself-forth]; technics is no longer a modality of disclosure in accordance with the growing of being as phusis. Technics becomes modern when metaphysics expresses and completes itself as the project of calculative reason with a view to mastery and possession of nature, itself no longer understood as phusis.

–Bernard Steigler, Technics and Time I
Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
General Introduction, p. 10

To be clear, I am not positing the situation of musical performance as the cure or an escape from this violence, nor am I positing that violence is the only frame in which to understand the transformative character of technics. But I do feel that the juxtaposition of performance and sonification is a powerful reminder of degree to which the interpretive act is part of a technical discourse, and that all systematics have aesthetic implications.