Sound Objects: Speculative Perspectives

My PhD dissertation, successfully defended in February 2012, available to download here. 

Abstract:

The terminology that listeners, composers, performers, and scholars use to describe music and sound affects their functions and ontologies. Terminology alone can transform music and sound from experiences to things, from encounters to commodities, from interaction to domination. In other words, terminology influences the qualities and forms of our attitudes and responses toward music. My dissertation is concerned with one instance of influential terminology: the term “sound object,” a cornerstone of electronic-music discourse. Conceptualizing “sound objects” as the atomistic “elements” of music implies that music possesses a tactile, embodied way of being. Sound objects therefore elicit inquiries from several perspectives. I consider sound objects from nominalistic, ontological, epistemological, music-analytical, and historical points of view, all of which differ considerably from one another.

The “sound object” first appeared in the 1950s as Pierre Schaeffer’s conceptualization of music’s “raw element,” which he believed listeners could learn to hear. Post-Schaeffer, the sound object acquired several definitions and exists today in a variety of contexts. A sound object may be a sampled or recontextualized sound, as the author Chris Cutler describes. Alternately, as in the electronic music of Curtis Roads, a sound object is simply a sonic unit, comprising anything from a noise to a melodic segment. The sound object is also a musical genre for ringtone composers such as Antoine Schmitt. Elsewhere, it is a sonic evocation of physical gesture, as in Rolf Inge Godøy’s research on motor-mimetic music cognition.

My objectives are to assess the term “sound object’s” potential as an increasingly prevalent aesthetic category, and to theorize and critique the sound object as a materialistic manner of description too often taken at face value. To be sure, the “sound-as-thing” may serve as a basic analytical category that may foreground the importance of subjective listening to analysis. But the tactility implied by the word “object” may misrepresent sonic and musical experiences as tangible and stable, despite their actual temporality. That said, the word “object” may elicit reflections on music’s relationships to embodiment, and critique habitual assumptions concerning musical experience and music’s ability to communicate truth.

Hegel’s Being-Fluid in Corregidora, Blues, and (Post)Black Aesthetics

In Hegel’s system, all identities are unstable. Beings and concepts continually become their others in order to remain themselves. This notion of being-fluid powers Gayl Jones’ novel Corregidora, in which the protagonist’s personal identity comes from the identities of others with whom she interacts – including her ancestors, who suffered the cruelties of slavery. Blues music, by which Jones’ novel is inspired, also embodies and performs the presence of enslaved ancestors, and of the African-American community as such, in present-day African-American individuals. This article therefore offers Hegelian readings, based on his theory of identity as fluid, of Corregidora, the blues, and the African-American identity performed in these artworks. Through these readings, I propose, following Hegel, that all identities be denied fixed definitions, in favor of fluid ones that allow for change and the sublation of otherness – even Hegel’s identity. With Paul Taylor, whose theory of post-black aesthetics relies on the fluidity of racial classifications, I argue for Hegel’s relevance to African-American aesthetics, despite his just classification as a white racist.

This article is published in the peer-reviewed journal Evental Aesthetics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2012). Link directly to the article here (pdf), or here (html).

Action, Composition - Morton Feldman and Physicality

Morton Feldman’s writings reveal his ambivalent conception of musical sound, which led him to mixed opinions of the meaning of composition. To Feldman, sounds are at once human bodily actions, the objects of those actions, and the ultimate results of action upon material. He therefore insists that the efforts of composers, performers, instruments, and listeners should not be discounted from any consideration of music. However, he frequently refers to musical components as though they were autonomous, tangible objects. Feldman believed that a sound should be appreciated for its own sake as an individual – like a completed painting from which the painter’s hand has retreated, having done all that it can. His conflicting notions of musical sound and time reflect the double-sided definition of “physicality,” which refers at once to human bodily action and to tangible material in general. Through almost literal representation of slips of ancient paper in his chamber work The Turfan Fragments, Feldman attempts to create music that exemplifies tangibility, while simultaneously illustrating that in music “tangibility” cannot be more than illusion. The Turfan Fragments also represents a somewhat extreme underscoring of the physical effort required in musical performance. The piece thereby brings to the forefront both aspects of physicality – materiality and action – which inform Feldman’s understanding of composition and sound.

A version of this paper was presented at the 2009 meeting of the College Music Society's Pacific Chapter.

Link to the paper here.
And to the musical examples and figures here.

Sound Image Deconstruction in Gyula Csapó’s Krapp’s Last Tape – After Samuel Beckett

"Sound Image Deconstruction in Gyula Csapó’s Krapp’s Last Tape – After Samuel Beckett"

Composed in 1975 for violin, tape recorder, sine tone generator, and spotlights, Gyula Csapó’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” depends on the possibility that sound may function as an image. By this I mean not only that sound may evoke impressions of visible phenomena – as a recording of a train whistle may bring us to a “mental image” of a train – but also that sonic compositions may assume characteristics normally attributed to images. If we take “image” to mean a visual rendering of some kind, such characteristics may include apparent consistency over time, as in a still image, or the apparent layering of flat “planes,” as in the foreground and background of a picture. However, an “image” may also be a “mental image,” in which case it is one’s understanding or memory of some phenomenon or concept. The “image” of a phenomenon could therefore refer to the popular understanding of the phenomenon. One of Csapó’s intentions in “Krapp’s Last Tape” is to engage the “image” of classical music by foregrounding the constraining, stifling aspects of concert etiquette.

“Krapp’s” also invokes other kinds of images. In a manner similar to that described above, one may also speak of one’s “self-image”: one’s understanding of oneself, which may not always coincide with that which one conveys to others. In a similar sense, philosophers often define “images” as “simulacra”: imitations or representations of reality which are nonetheless unreal, non-actual (Plato, Zizek, Baudelaire). In many instances, what our eyes seem to perceive are in fact representations, hence to varying degrees distortions of the truth. I will argue that in “Krapp’s Last Tape,” the sounds produced by the tape recorder and sine tone generator in fact represent the “self-image” of the violinist on stage – the truth of his thoughts. By contrast, what he plays “live” before our eyes is but a simulacrum of his true feelings. Thus Csapó effectively invokes the philosophical mind/body problem: is the mind separate from the body, and to what extent (Descartes)? Does the “mind’s eye” even exist? Are “mental images” actually possible? (Wittgenstein argues in the negative.) Overall it is my contention that Csapó’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” calls to our attention the various meanings of “image,” explores the image as a concept and the implications thereof. This paper draws on the work of Michel Chion, suggesting that whether we experience “Krapp’s” as a performance or via an audio recording, we must see/hear the piece, in the sense of Chion’s “audio-vision.” I further suggest that in “Krapp’s” attempt to spatialize time, Csapó was influenced by his dissertation advisor, Morton Feldman. I draw on those essays of Feldman’s in which he insists that music ought to deal with time rather than “timing,” that it ought to approach time as an image.

Link to the paper. And a "map" of significant events in "Krapp's Last Tape."

The Glammogr and the Present Inquiry

Published in the February 2010 newsletter of the Center for Studies on Women at UCLA, a special issue on writing about music. A description of my piece by newsletter editors Alexandra Apolloni, Nina Sun Eidsheim, and Jillian Rodgers:

"[In "The Glammogr and the Present Inquiry"] Mandy-Suzanne Wong questions the professed objectivity of scholarship, and both demonstrates and theorizes the performance acts present equally in scholarship and in fantasy fiction."

Citation information: Wong, Mandy-Suzanne. "The Glammogr and the Present Inquiry." Newsletter of the UCLA Center for Research on Women: Special Edition - Writing and Music, (2010): http://www.csw.ucla.edu/publications/newsletters/ay-2009-10/full-pdfs/CSW_update_WM10.pdf, pp.22-25.

http://www.csw.ucla.edu/publications/newsletters/ay-2009-10/full-pdfs/CSW_update_WM10.pdf

Link to "The Glammogr".
And to the entire issue of the CSW newsletter.