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Stelarc's "Third Arm" functioning in cooperation with his congenital limbs. Handswriting (Tokyo: Maki Gallery, 1982). Photographed by Keisuke Oki. V C Stelarc.
Context in source publication
Context 1
... discussions of the project have appeared elsewhere. 173 For present purposes the iconic image of the three hands writing "evolution" in 1982, shown in figure 6, captures at once the stubborn alterity of wearable enhancement technology, while inscribing the need for harmony and synchrony between "parts" in any claim for a transhuman evolution. This image constitutes but a momentary semblance, however, for it is only with the surgical permanence of the third ear that Stelarc's performance art begins to tip into the category of morphological enhancement with its uncertain claims toward evolutionary change. ...
Citations
... 52 James (2008). See also Avdeeff (2019); Weheliye (2002); Trippett (2017). 53 See Sofer (2022) its novelty aligns with the post-hermeneutic empiricism articulated by Baitz, Philip Ewell, myself, and others. ...
Trans composers, like other people marginalized by race, gender, or sexuality, are often caught in the trap of identity constructs, which both envoice minorities and also pigeonhole their possible range of musical expression. In this essay on US-based transgender Indigenous Mexican choral composer Mari Esabel Valverde, I let my consideration of "trans music theory" be guided by her view that writers have sensationalized trans identity, and that while she celebrates trans lives in her choral work Our Phoenix (2016), she is not attempting to create music that "sounds" transgender. With Valverde in mind, I construct an intersectional interpretive framework that calls for various kind of limits (the limits of queering, of authorial subjectivity, and of the notion of "unconscious" expression of identity) and proposes essential conditions (the centrality of the voices, bodies, and musical structures of trans composers) that create an ethical environment for a compassionate trans music theory to emerge.
... Weaver, A. J et al. used the AMMA to test the musical abilities of music teachers and musicians, noting the importance of both musical talent and acquired training efforts in becoming outstanding musicians and music educators [12]. Trippett, D. J et al. explored and discussed the potential of human auditory perception for applications such as music, such as perceiving ultrasound potential, etc [13]. ...
This study explores a university music teaching system enhanced by auditory perception technology. It delves into the intricacies of auditory perception technology and its integration with multimodal music education, highlighting the potential applications in university settings. Using short Fourier transform and wavelet transform techniques, the system computes Mel frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCCs) and first-order differential dynamic music characteristics. These are then utilized to construct the multimodal teaching framework through computer programming languages. The multimodal music teaching system was tested and analyzed using data analysis software. The results showed that the experimental group and the control group produced significant differences (P<0.05) in the four aspects of fluency (0.005), flexibility (0.003), originality (0.001), and the total score of singing skills (0.004) of music singing skills. This study not only enriches theoretical research on multimodal teaching innovations in music but also promotes the development of university music education.
... Sciarrino's proposition of five archetypal formal configurations-generalized as "the figure of music" (le figure della musica) (Giacco 2001;Song 2006)-adopts a holistic, cross-modal approach to auditory perception, conceptualizing the dynamic formation of processes and pa erns prevalent in natural and artificial phenomena. The focus on perception is, meanwhile, manifest in a devoted exploration of threshold or liminal experiences (Leydon 2012;Helgeson 2013;Trippe 2017). The experiments with listening in its liminal conditions consequently call into question the boundaries between the so-called "musical" and "non-musical," the human and non-human worlds. ...
Does it make sense to refer to musical sounds as “animated beings”? What does it mean to treat music as an essential part of our sonic reality? How do Sciarrino’s music and his general aesthetic, both of which he describes as organic or ecological, respond to theories of organicism, ecological approaches to musical perception, and ties between the human and non-human worlds? In this article, I attempt to weave together a framework that facilitates fruitful answers to these questions. The starting points for this theorization of Sciarrino’s organicism are Holly Watkins’s (2017, 2018) biotic aesthetics of music and Eric Clarke’s (2005) ecological approach to the perception of musical meaning, which emphasize the role of the listener and question the stance that separates meaning from form, culture from nature, and the human from the non-human. Through analyses of examples from works including Lohengrin, Azione invisibile (1982–84), Il cerchio tagliato dei suoni (1997), and Studi per l’intonazione del mare (2000), I argue that Sciarrino’s music and thinking venture into a holistic reinvention of organicism. A key aspect of this organicism is its formal affinity with behaviors characteristic of systems of chaos, including self-similarity, circularity, and turbulence. In addition, I illustrate how the wide-ranging analogies that Sciarrino’s music draws to the world of animate and inanimate beings involve both formal issues and the bodily, performative, and societal dimensions of music-making.
... regardless of who that person was: self or other). This attitude may be an effect of describing the device in our cover story as a physical prosthesis, for which 'installing' it covertly would be seen as an unacceptable breach of consent-autonomy [49]. To control for physicality, future work could e.g. ...
Rapid technological advances in artificial intelligence are creating opportunities for real-time algorithmic modulations of a person’s facial and vocal expressions, or ‘deep-fakes’. These developments raise unprecedented societal and ethical questions which, despite much recent public awareness, are still poorly understood from the point of view of moral psychology. We report here on an experimental ethics study conducted on a sample of N = 303 participants (predominantly young, western and educated), who evaluated the acceptability of vignettes describing potential applications of expressive voice transformation technology. We found that vocal deep-fakes were generally well accepted in the population, notably in a therapeutic context and for emotions judged otherwise difficult to control, and surprisingly, even if the user lies to their interlocutors about using them. Unlike other emerging technologies like autonomous vehicles, there was no evidence of social dilemma in which one would, for example, accept for others what they resent for themselves. The only real obstacle to the massive deployment of vocal deep-fakes appears to be situations where they are applied to a speaker without their knowing, but even the acceptability of such situations was modulated by individual differences in moral values and attitude towards science fiction.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.
Trans composers, like other people marginalized by race, gender, or sexuality, are often caught in the trap of identity constructs, which both envoice minorities and also pigeonhole their possible range of musical expression. In this essay on US-based transgender Indigenous Mexican choral composer Mari Esabel Valverde, I let my consideration of “trans music theory” be guided by her view that writers have sensationalized trans identity, and that while she celebrates trans lives in her choral work Our Phoenix (2016), she is not attempting to create music that “sounds” transgender. With Valverde in mind, I construct an intersectional interpretive framework that calls for various kind of limits (the limits of queering, of authorial subjectivity, and of the notion of “unconscious” expression of identity) and proposes essential conditions (the centrality of the voices, bodies, and musical structures of trans composers) that create an ethical environment for a compassionate trans music theory to emerge.
The ‘Elegy on the Nightingale’ is a curious Latin poem of uncertain (but probably post-classical) date and authorship that is transmitted by several medieval manuscripts. It offers a catalogue of animal sounds rich in what linguists call iconicity, and literary scholars, onomatopoeia: to read these verses aloud is to imitate the sounds being described. The poem begins in address to the nightingale of its title, praised for her ability to make music by mimicking all she hears. By the end has the poem itself done the same? For all their playfulness, the verses strike at the heart of our own theoretical commonplaces, starting with the supposed arbitrariness of the sign, always unsettled by such examples, exceptional though they may be. So too did the writing down of non-human sounds preoccupy ancient linguists, who sought to segregate them from language proper. Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny that these sound-words conjure what they name, especially since, in many cases, it is only our ability to match their sounds to animals we can still hear that enables us to know what the poem is saying. What happens to our understanding of the poetic text as a transcription of human speech or song when we take it seriously as a recording of non-human sound? And even more dramatically, what happens to our understanding of human language when we strive (as this poem strives, albeit surreptitiously) to listen with non-human ears? With some help from the animal imaginings of Jakob von Uexküll, this article attempts some preliminary answers.
The discourse of posthumanism is made up of a group of approaches to cultural theory and philosophy that attempt to supersede perceived limitations of the humanisms of the twentieth-century. In the essay that follows, I will try to outline these approaches as they have taken shape over the last thirty years or so. I will suggest that their move beyond humanism points toward something implausible or even impossible: a thought that appears at a horizon beyond the human but is nevertheless our thought. Such a thought, posited as a goal of posthumanist projects, will only be approached asymptotically, converged on but never touched. Music offers us a means to track this convergence-music conceived widely enough to assert its own special position, which defines an aspect of human exceptionalism at the same time as it links human and nonhuman experience. Posthumanist lineages Like the "postmodernism" that anticipated it by several decades, "posthumanism" is a label that insists on qualification and apology. In what sense is "post-" meant, since it is not intended to signal merely a temporal succession beyond Enlightenment humanism and its twentieth-century outgrowths? Alternative terms have been suggested. Richard Grusin (2015) offers "nonhuman," a choice that can evade teleologies raised by post-. But its nominative form, nonhumanism, signals a cancelation of humanism or an antihumanism, which is not Grusin's intent; so a more specific denomination is required to name the recent gathering of momentum among theories of materiality, objects, technics, and so forth: the "nonhuman turn." Others address antihumanism head-on, embracing a term that has its own longer history connected to anti-Enlightenment and atheist thought. For Rosi Braidotti (2013:23), however, this move remains bound to Foucault's "death of Man" in The Order of Things (a move that, half a century later, can seem a weak gesture in that otherwise extraordinary book); the effort to dismantle the post-Enlightenment European subject now appears to be parochial and partial, indicating only one of several varieties of posthumanism. I have suggested "parahumanism," an alternative that avoids questions of temporality in favor of an extension beside and around the human (Tomlinson 2013,
This study introduces the practice of body hacking, modification, and extension of the body through technological means, and discusses a possible approach to anthropological research on people with technologically extended sensory apparatus. Most DIY modifications promise to extend capacities of the body not just quantitatively by enhancing what already exists, but qualitatively by adding new senses or organs that enable new connections with the outer world. The question is how it is possible to approach in social science research the subjective bodily experience of someone with sensory abilities beyond the human norm. This article proposes to look at this phenomenon from the standpoint of von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt, which focuses on the study of the subjective experiential world of nonhuman animals and puts emphasis on processes of meaning creation, and not only in a symbolic and discursive way. Following current criticism of representationalism in anthropology, it will be suggested here that the Umwelt concept has a great potential for conceptualization of the technologically modified body in sociocultural anthropology and related disciplines.
This edited collection examines the culture of surveillance as it is expressed in the built environment. Expanding on discussions from previous collections; Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (2017) and Surveillance, Race, Culture (2018), this book seeks to explore instances of surveillance within and around specific architectural entities, both historical and fictitious, buildings with specific social purposes and those existing in fiction, film, photography, performance and art. Providing new readings of, and expanding on Foucault’s work on the panopticon, these essays examine the role of surveillance via disparate fields of enquiry, such as the humanities, social sciences, technological studies, design and environmental disciplines. Surveillance, Architecture and Control seeks to engender new debates about the nature of the surveilled environment through detailed analyses of architectural structures and spaces; examining how cultural, geographical and built space buttress and produce power relations. The various essays address the ongoing fascination with contemporary notions of surveillance and control.
