Presented at a special session entitled
"Writing Sound," at the 2012 meeting of the American Comparative
Literature Association, this talk, despite its somewhat informal tone, protests
the American military and police forces' use of sound cannons - their deployment
of sound as a weapon. What sort of
concepts and pre-understandings seem to excuse this horrifying behavior? I suggest that the popular conception of
sound as an object - as blunt, passive thing - which is quite common in
creative and musicological discussions, contribute to the epistemic
underpinnings of sonic weaponization.
Below is the abstract I submitted with this talk, and a link to a pdf
version of the entire talk.
***
To a significant extent, what music is depends on what we call it. The
terminology employed by listeners, composers, performers, and scholars to
describe music affects how we – as listeners, musicians, and as a society –
treat music. Terminology alone can transform music and sound from experiences
to things, from encounters to commodities, from interactions to forms of
domination. This paper describes the history and connotations of one such
influential term: “sound object,” a
cornerstone of electronic-music discourse. This term was coined in the late
1940s by musique concrète pioneer Pierre
Schaeffer, who conceived “l’objet sonore”
as the audible “raw element” of music. Post-Schaeffer, “sound object” acquired
several definitions and exists today in a variety of contexts. I will describe
the varied applications of the term in the discourse surrounding contemporary
electronic music; the scientistic attitude from which the term stemmed; and its
latent implications. On the positive side, the use of the term “sound object”
may associate music with “new materialist” philosophies, which conceive even
non-human entities as empowered, affective beings. And analyzing music in terms
of “sound objects” may foreground the importance of subjective listening
perspectives. Less desirable, however, are the term’s equally plausible
associations with reification-as-domination which, at its most extreme, seems
to excuse dangerous misconceptions and uses
of music and sound as passive, blunt, even harmful things - for instance in the "long-range acoustical
devices" or sound cannons
frequently deployed by American military and police forces. Overall, my goal is
to assess the sound object’s potential as an increasingly prevalent,
materialistic aesthetic category, too often taken at face value.
Download this talk here.
