What Is Sound?

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WHAT IS SOUND?
Keynote Address to ICMC/SMC 2014, Athens.
Peter Nelson
University of Edinburgh, UK.
p.nelson@ed.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
What is sound? This question is posed in contradiction to
the every-day understanding that sound is a phenomenon
apart from us, to be heard, made, shaped and organised.
Thinking through the history of computer music, and
considering the current configuration of digital communi-
cations, sound is reconfigured as a type of network. This
network is envisaged as non-hierarchical, in keeping with
currents of thought that refuse to prioritise the human in
the world. The relationship of sound to music proposes
ways of thinking about and tapping into the network, in
the hope of re-enchanting sound with the grace of art.
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Computer Music
It is exactly forty years since the first International Com-
puter Music Conference was held, at Michigan State
University in East Lansing, under the chairmanship of
David Wessel. At that point, in 1976, several strands of
thought, creative practice and technology had come to-
gether to inform a research agenda that coined the term,
computer music; and that term has been with us ever
since.
Even by 1976 I suggest that the term covered a pretty
broad range of technical and aesthetic concerns: along-
side Max Matthews’ MUSIC programs, Iannis Xenakis
was developing his UPIC system in Paris, Peter Zinovieff
in Putney was using a minicomputer to control his Synthi
voltage-controlled analogue systems, in Utrecht, Gott-
fried Michael Koenig was developing algorithmic and
synthesis software in his series of Projects, and so on.
The point here is not so much to tell the history of a
widely distributed effort, involving many extraordinary
individuals, as to recall for a moment the nature of the
enterprise, and in particular the contrast between excite-
ment and effort. A computer in 1976 was the size of a
large refrigerator: it cost many thousands of dollars, and
required space, an air-conditioning system, and dedicated
administration. Computers were exciting because they
represented power and potential. They were associated
with the space-launch programmes, and in their science
fiction representations they assumed the intelligence of
human beings. Indeed Artificial Intelligence was a re-
search area boasting university institutes and a frisson of
highly public anticipation.
The cost of computers, and the knowledge required to
look after them meant that they were out of reach - and
thus outside of the knowledge - of ordinary people. They
were exotic and quixotic, and they held the prestige of
being at the very frontier of technical, scientific and in-
dustrial advance. To make music with computers was to
assert the power of music as an art. On the other hand,
their actual operation was difficult and time-consuming.
Even typing commands into a dumb terminal was often a
non-real-time activity. Programs had to be written, de-
bugged, compiled and then run sometimes for many
hours before a result was forthcoming. I remember my-
self, at MIT in the early 1980s, taking twenty-six hours to
compute a modest five minutes of sound, and that then
turned out to contain some unwanted distortion and had
to be computed again.
The point here is not to wonder at the advances that
have taken place subsequently, but to take stock of the
methodology in operation. To work with computers
brought prestige, and demanded funds and facilities. The
work paradigm asserted the difficulties of the business of
investigating and creating sound, and the encapsulation of
the musical work as a large-scale problem, incapable of
solution except with the unparalleled computational pow-
er of a dedicated machine.
1.2 Ubiquitous mobile devices
Today things are very different, and I will briefly run
through the comparison we all know, in order to reveal
the nature of the issue I want to consider here.
I was woken up this morning by a small and immensely
powerful computer sitting next to my bed, which I then
popped into my jacket pocket as I left my room. It needs
no air-conditioning, nor does it require any very specialist
attention. As I leave, it alerts me to a message sent by my
partner. Then, being uncertain about the location of the
Onassis Centre, I use my fingers to negotiate the appear-
ance of a scalable map of Athens on which I find my
route - a small blue marker on the map follows my pro-
gress in real time. To calm my nerves I pop in my ear-
phones and select a suitable piece of music to play as I
walk - all on the same tiny, yet immensely powerful de-
vice.
This is an utterly different enterprise to that of histori-
cal computing. Each of these actions represents an enor-
mous and complex set of computations, but those compu-
tational efforts are not the focus of the apparatus. They
Copyright: © 2014 Peter Nelson. This is an open-access article distribu-
ted under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0
Unported, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction
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are utterly transparent. I need know nothing, except to
look and to point. This tiny computer is not an extraordi-
nary version of the monster from 1976: it does not com-
pute the results of my problems, so much as it connects
and contextualises me in a network of data. This is not
something remote from ordinary people: everyone has
such a device - my friend in Africa has one. The posses-
sion of a particular make or model may indeed provide
some prestige, but it is a prestige that is local and infor-
mal. The device is anyway a phone.
Those of us who saw personal computers at the start,
who became addicted to keeping up to date, and who
took pride in maintaining the fastest model we could af-
ford are suddenly looking anxiously at a market place
where new models are slow to appear. In the face of
ubiquitous mobile technologies, will the computer - as
such - even survive? The paradigm has shifted, and the
network enfolds us. Far from presenting as slaves to our
incommensurable desires, computers are now our points
of connection within a network of social relationships and
contingent information. What are the implications of this
fact for music; for organised sound?
2. ORGANISED SOUND
The subtitle of this conference - From Digital Echos to
Virtual Ethos - reminds us that sound has implications for
human beings, and it is sound itself that I want to consid-
er here. The word echos (ἦχος / ἠχή) implies sound in an
unformed state “… of the confused noise of a crowd, the
roar of the sea, the groaning of trees in a wind …” ac-
cording to Liddle and Scott. This is the meaning Michel
Serres uses, in his book Genesis, when he writes about
the fundamental medium within which human beings
operate, taking the sea as source and metaphor –
The silence of the sea is an illusion. The sound of the
depths could be the depth of being. Perhaps being is not
at rest, perhaps is it not moving, perhaps being is agi-
tated. The sound of the depths never ceases, is limitless,
is continuous, perpetual, unalterable. It has no depth it-
self, it has no contradictions. What would have to be
done with sound to impose silence on it. And what
formidable fury can impose order on fury? Sound can-
not be a phenomenon, all phenomena detach them-
selves from it, figure on ground, like a fire on the heath,
like all messages, all cries, every call, every signal has
to detach itself from the din that occupies silence, in
order to be, to be perceived, to be known, to be ex-
changed. For a phenomenon to appear, it leaves the
noise, as soon as a shape surges and positions itself, it
reveals itself veiling the noise. So this is not about phe-
nomenology, rather it is about being itself. It establish-
es itself as subject as much as object, as hearing and as
spatial, as observer and as observed, it encompasses the
means and the uses of observation, both material and
systematic, in channels constructed or linguistic, it is
in-itself, it is for-itself, it leaps over the the oldest and
the most secure divisions of philosophy, yes, sound is
metaphysical. [17] (this author’s trans.)
Here we begin to understand sound and listening as de-
pendent variables, mutually defining, equal in operation.
When, in a lecture given at Yale University in 1962, en-
titled, The Electronic Medium, Edgar Varése coined the
phrase “organised sound” he also encapsulated a defining
approach to the nature of sound itself. For Varèse, sound
appears as raw material from “a mysterious world”, in an
industrial environment where he describes himself as a
“worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities.” [20]
The computer is the machine which, like the blast furnace
and the mechanical hammer ensures that, “Composers are
now able, as never before, to satisfy the dictates of that
inner ear of the imagination.”: design and make. This
echoes an earlier manifesto, from June 1917, in which
Varèse proclaimed -
I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and
which with their contribution of a whole new world of
unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exi-
gencies of my inner rhythm. [20]
This vision continues nearly a hundred years later in re-
marks made by one of the key figures in the development
of computer music, Max Matthews, when he says, in a
2009 interview –
The question which is going to dominate the future is
now understanding what kinds of sounds we want to
produce rather than the means of usefully generating
these sounds musically. [14]
Here the notion that the computer is capable of produc-
ing, “any sound you can imagine”, echoing Varèse’s de-
sire for, “undreamed-of timbres” in “any combination I
choose to impose” continues a rhetoric of control and
domination that I want to question for a moment.
If, in its beginnings, the computer presents as a machine
for the industrial manufacture of sound, what alteration to
this paradigm is proposed by the existence of the net-
work? Matthews in his 2009 interview continues, presci-
ently as always, to propose that future of computer music,
“… is going to revolve around experimental psychologi-
cal studies of how the brain and ear react to sounds …”,
and this raises the question of listening which is what I
want to address next. How can we extend our understand-
ing of the relation of sound to listening?
3. LISTENING
3.1 The Current of Music
Listening has been the subject of a considerable amount
of discussion in recent years. Sociologists, neuroscien-
tists, psychologists and cultural theorists have all reached
the conclusion that listening, as a central phenomenon in
human experience, is not as well understood as common
sense would suppose. The common sense paradigm of
listening is laid out clearly by Theodor Adorno, in his
essay, Current of Music, where he writes –

The question of why we follow this descriptive or
“phenomenological” method can easily be answered.
We are dwelling on the phenomenon [“of music pour-
ing out of the loudspeaker”] because it is actually the
phenomenon which determines the reaction of the lis-
teners, and it is our ultimate aim to study the listeners.”
[1]
This places sound and listening in a teleological relation-
ship that is at the heart of philosophical and scientific
investigations of musical meaning and communication.
This relationship is also, as Jonathan Sterne points out,
consolidated by the seeming directionality of the wires
and speaker mouths of sound reproduction technologies,
that, as Adorno agrees, appear to be aimed at the ears of
the listener. Sterne writes –
The salient features of audile technique considered here
- the connection of listening and rationality; the separa-
tion of the sense, the segmentation of acoustic space;
the construction of sound as a carrier of meaning in it-
self; and the emphasis on physical, social, and episte-
mological mediation - are all fundamental to the ways
in which people listened to and with sound-
reproduction technologies, … [19]
Here we have a paradigm in which sound and listening
are independent and self-sufficient; where sound, as a
phenomenon in its own right, is susceptible to the sort of
design and control proposed by Varèse, Schaeffer and
others, and where listening, as a decoding of meaning and
affect for human purposes can be studied psychological-
ly, sociologically and neurologically for our better under-
standing. Is there another paradigm for listening?
3.2 Ecologies of listening
Consider this account, by Penny McCall Howard, of the
experience of working on a fishing boat in the North Sea
-
A trawler at sea is also an incredibly noisy place and
every sound is significant. Yet these sounds were inter-
preted not so much by listening as by extended tech-
niques for feeling with the whole body, combined with
a constant adjustment of tools, machines, and enormous
weights and tensions. New crew needed an ‘education
of attention’ (Gibson, 1979:254) in order to ‘feel the
ground’ and react appropriately in order to ‘keep the
trawl going’. They had to learn to distinguish the vibra-
tions coming through the fishing gear from the ground
from the constant noise and vibration of the engine, the
whine of the electronics, and the shuddering and slam-
ming of the boat itself in the waves. Fishermen use
these techniques to work productively and also to de-
velop complex descriptions and visualisations of what
their fishing gear and the seafloor far below looked
like. [8]
The critical phrase here is ‘education of attention’, a con-
cept that comes from James Gibson’s ecological ap-
proach to visual perception [7]. This ‘ecological’ para-
digm proposes sound and listening as much more curi-
ously entwined: sounds are not just there for the taking,
they have to be identified - constructed even - in an inter-
play between the phenomenon of the sound and the phe-
nomenon of the listening. This formulation goes to the
heart of what I am attempting in this talk, part of the con-
sideration of ethos, which is an even-ing out of the hier-
archies of the world in a way that places humans as no
more than equal with other phenomena. Lest this sound
too ‘hippy’, here is the psychologist Eric Clarke’s ac-
count of the ecological approach to listening-
Rather than considering perception to be a constructive
process, in which the perceiver builds structure into an
internal model of the world, the ecological approach
emphasizes the structure of the environment itself and
regards perception as the pick-up of that already struc-
tured perceptual information. The simple, but far-
reaching, assertion is that the world is not a “blooming
buzzing confusion”, but is a highly structured environ-
ment subject to both the forces of nature (gravity, illu-
mination, organic growth, the action of wind and water)
and the profound impact of human beings and their cul-
tures; and that in a reciprocal fashion perceivers are
highly structured organisms that are adapted to that en-
vironment. [3]
Like the fishermen in the trawler, who have to adapt to a
sound world through an ‘education of attention’, Clarke
proposes that we also have to attend and adapt to our son-
ic environment, and that this is not only a matter of con-
tingent necessity, but is also an evolutionary process that
has been happening since the start of human culture.
Indeed from a cultural perspective, our ‘education of at-
tention’ as musicians is a highly considered activity. As
Simon Frith has pointed out, so-called art music is curi-
ous, as an area of life where people are taught how to
listen in a highly institutionalised fashion. This listening
actually constitutes sound, in the sense that our activity of
listening in the world negotiates a territory. What is the
territory of computer music?
4. TERRITORY
4.1 Sound of the earth
The notion of territory has been examined with some care
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [6], and clearly in
the spirit of music. The child who cries, or the bird that
sings establishes a social configuration of a space with its
own materiality. In the words of Henri Lefebvre –
When we evoke ‘space’ we must immediately indicated
what occupies that space and how it does so: the de-
ployment of energy in relation to ‘points’ and within
what time frame. [12]
This speaks to the particular relationship between music
or sound and ourselves. It is clear that this relationship is
indeed special and fundamental: the world, for example,

is not bathed in sound as it is bathed in light; there is no
sonic equivalent of ‘darkness’, and the fact that we hear
without the aid of a source of sonic ‘illumination’ gives
sound an inherent energetic quality, unbeholden to any
extraterrestrial power source. Every sound is evidence of
a particular vitality, and the provenance and impact of
these vitalities create spaces that live and resonate in our
personal and shared experiences.
In that sense a soundscape, so-called, consists equally
of sound and listening. Its territory is established by the
interaction of those two phenomena. One could even ar-
gue - as I have done elsewhere [22]- that not only humans
are listening. In that sense sound needs to created, in a
way different to what is imagined by Edgar Varèse: not
just as something ‘out there’ but equally as a construct of
the listener. Technology has a part to play in this, and the
fundamental notion of the musical instrument - as the
location of a practice of listening - proposes technological
apparatus right at the heart of the human enterprise. What
territories of sound and listening have established them-
selves in the age of electronic music?
In his recent book, Earth Sound, Earth Signal, Douglas
Kahn describes the history of electrical communication
from the middle of the 19th century in terms of the
sounding potential revealed by new technologies. This,
for example, is a description by Herbert N. Casson, of
listening to a telephone line, published in 1910 -
Noises! Such a jangle of meaningless noises had never
been heard by human ears. There were spluttering and
bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming.
[…] There were clicks from telegraph wires, scraps of
talk from other telephones and curious squeals that
were unlike any other known sound. The lines running
east and west were noisier than the the lines running
north and south. The night was noisier than the day,
and at the ghostly hour of midnight, for what strange
reason no-one knows, the Babel was at its height. [10]
This new and fascinating engagement with sound arose
not only through the invention of devices that could ren-
der electrical signals audible, but also through the interac-
tion of those devices with the energies of the earth itself,
creating a new frontier for the sonic imagination. The
spread of commercial radio only extended this further.
4.2 Sound of the heavens
In 1961, first Yuri Gagarin from the USSR, then Alan
Shepherd and later John Glenn from the USA, burst into
outer space in manned rocket capsules. The American
launches were broadcast live on radio, and I remember
sitting by my primitive transistor radio with my head-
phones on listening to the countdown, pretending I was
really taking part. The crackly voices, the static, the relay
of the voices of the astronauts: these really were sounds
from space. By the following year the first communica-
tions satellite, Telstar, had been launched into orbit,
spawning the first hit single by a British band, The Tor-
nados, to reach number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot
100. The pulsing signal from the satellite formed part of
the intro, a sound we had all heard on the news, and the
strange warbling of the electronic Clavioline, a version of
the keyboard instrument developed by Constant Martin in
the late 1940s, made the melody seem also from outer
space.
By 1963, my family had acquired a television set, and
one November evening we sat down to watch the first
episode of a new BBC serial, Dr Who. I still remember it
quite clearly; the school science lab, and the strange girl
who seemed to know more about science than the teach-
ers. How, after school, two of the teachers followed her
back to her home, which seemed to be a blue Police Box
sitting in a scrapyard. But the crucial things were the
sounds: the extraordinary swirling and vaporous rhythms
of the signature tune, and the terrifying, raucous pumping
of the space-ship Tardis as it de-materialised. These were
sounds not just of the imagination but related to my real
experience of the æther; I had heard the sounds of the
universe on the radio, and they bound my imagination
closer to the science fiction of Dr Who, as they did to the
weird music I had heard on the radio, by Karlheinz
Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis.
This little bit of personal history is useful because it
connects certain elements of technology, sound and mu-
sic in a way that reveals what I take to be crucial forces in
the art of the last hundred years or so. Of the three tech-
nologies that have changed music beyond recognition -
telecommunication, recording and digital computing - I
would say it is auditory telecommunication that has most
shaped our senses and our imaginations. Even radio static
is not dead; it scintillates with detail, and every tiny move
of the tuning dial reveals new sounds, human and cosmic.
Sweeping the radio frequencies is like listening to a sort
of aural telescope that gives us an immediate sense of the
whole globe of our earth and the space beyond. Allegedly
NASA was nervous about making public the first photo-
graphs of the whole earth taken from space because they
thought the image would cause some sort of mass anxiety
attack, and yet anyone with a radio had already heard the
panorama of space, and its influence on music was im-
mense. In the concert hall, audiences were shy of this
new sound world, but in the incidental music to films and
television, in the feedback, fuzz and distortion of the
electric guitar in popular music, and at the heart of the
avant-garde music of the 50s and 60s we heard the un-
mistakable territory of the new universe of sound opened
up by electrical communication systems.
This radio universe is not just a macroscopic but also a
microscopic universe: it is not just the static of the iono-
sphere, it is also the constructs of the transistors and ca-
pacitors that make up the radio set. The electronic com-
ponents are embedded in a system that includes the world
and the heavens, and when we listen in, we are able to
participate with all those elements at play. In this context
I would challenge the notion of ‘sonic imagination’ as
some sort of industrial design process, prefigured by a
free-ranging human creativity. I find it improbable that
anyone can ‘imagine’ a hitherto unheard sound. What

19th century technology gave us was a set of technical
devices and processes that fundamentally reorganised our
listening. What is the digital echos? How do sound and
listening get constructed and reorganized in the world of
the digital network?
5. THE DIGITAL ECHOS
5.1 The mulch of sound
One of the things about which Bruno Latour [11] has
warned us is the danger inherent in the purification of our
topics of investigation. Things are always hybrid, and the
digital network is no exception. If the nature of the fun-
damental sonic background is captured by Michel Serres
in the presence and metaphor of the sea, the nature of the
digital background can be conceived of as a jumbled
amalgam of mobile devices, applications, data files
shared and purchased, speeds of connection, distributed
storage, nodes of interaction - both human and quasi-
human, social aggregations of these nodes, and so on.
Paul D. Miller characterises this as a “plagiarist’s club for
the famished souls of a geography of now-here” [13],
indicating his sense of a sort of aberrant temporality in
the network. If Serres’ image of the sea seems stable and
timeless, Miller’s view of the digital network is manic
and grasping; still a sense of the infinite present but with
an utterly different affect.
The currents of the sea and the currents of data make a
neat comparison, but there are more than subtle differ-
ences. In particular, data is now subject to a sort of infi-
nite storage and fragmentation, as files get backed-up and
deleted successively across the network. So-called
‘cloud-storage’ and ‘cloud-computing’ mean that data
and applications are no longer even integrated by the no-
tions of presence or operation within a particular machine
or system. They have become radically dispersed, and
when their appearances are called-up their constituent
parts remain like ghostly presences in the network.
This reminds me of Charles Darwin’s thoughts on the
material nature of human culture. In his 1881 publication,
The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of
Worms, with Observation on their Habits, Darwin makes
the singular claim that worms have played a defining role
in human history, by effecting the process through which
human artefacts are preserved. He writes -
(Worms protect) for an indefinitely long period every
object, not liable to decay, which is dropped on the sur-
face of the land, by burying it beneath their castings.
[5]
This means that much of human culture depends for its
very existence on tiny creatures which render an earth
hospitable to humans, and which supports and preserves
their buildings, rituals and artefacts. The mulch of the
earth hides and casts up the background noise of life. Is
there similarly a “mulch of data”, turned over by the ap-
plications, storage devices, human agents and social dy-
namics that constitute the digital network?
5.2 Malfunctions and refusals
This formulation purposively characterises the network as
an amalgam of devices, protocols, data, power, flesh and
blood humans - and by extension, animals and the physi-
cal world, in a configuration that is non-hierarchical with
respect to its flows of energy. But the hybrid nature of the
digital still proposes some crucial moments. As Richard
Coyne reminds us -
Creativity has long wrestled with the machine, which in
some respects has come to represent so much of what
art is against: automation, control, reproduction, mind-
less copying, predictability, and of course capitalist
production … But there are also machines that are out
of control, runaway devices, malfunctions, break-
downs, glitches. [4]
This reminds us not just of malfunctioning machines, but
also of the power of malfunction itself: the digital net-
work is not a free-flowing utopia of functionality, how-
ever hybrid. It is also subject to hacking and cracking,
misuse and dismemberment. Its data flows can circulate
but they can also be tapped and siphoned off, disrupted
and held to ransom. As the digital network proposes a
sort of globalised control, it proposes forces of resistance
and subversion. We remind ourselves that while some
artists have produced machines, computer software and
interfaces at the cutting edge of technological develop-
ment, there are others who have, for example, simply
tossed a pile of cheap circuit components into a bowel of
water and prodded them randomly with an electrical cur-
rent to hear what happens.
6. ECHOS AND MOUSIKĒ
The Modernist narrative of the start of computing and
computer music proposed an incremental progression of
cost and efficiency, dictated by Moore’s Law, where
cheaper, faster and smarter devices would lead inexorably
to the sort of knowledge and understanding of sound,
dreamed of by Varèse, that would produce an overflow-
ing abundance of new music of hitherto unimagined
beauties, through industrial processes of organisation. But
Music - Mousikē - is not quite like that. In the dialogue,
Cratylus, Plato shows Socrates searching for meaning by
considering the origins of words in a sort of linguistic
genealogy. At one point Socrates, in speaking of Apollo
says -
The name of the Muses and of music would seem to be
derived from searching and their making philosophical
enquiries (mwsqai). [15]
Here Music is understood not as some sort of object or
artefact, however intangible and transitory; nor is it the
focus of a sort of craft or manufacturing. There is certain-
ly a process at work, but that process is one of question-
ing and the forming of relationships: to search is to define
and establish contact with an area, having a purpose in
mind, but also open to the activity of reading. What has
this area got to tell? As Tim Ingold reminds us -

Ever since Bacon and Galileo, nature has been thought
of as a book that will not willingly give up its secrets to
human readers … for medieval readers as for indige-
nous hunters, creatures would speak and offer counsel.
[9]
This once again reminds us of a sense of agency that is
evenly distributed, without favouring human participants.
While I understand, and sympathise with, Varèse’s need
to find a new way of expressing what sound could be
capable of, organisation proposes a sort of activity to
which music has often remained resistant. Music searches
in sound. It listens, in the sense of seeking to find and
construct processes, images and affects. Music is open to
what sound has to say. Music is the consequence of lis-
tening. I want to express this thought in this fashion, once
again, to suggest gently that not only human beings are
capable of agency.
In a paper presented to the UNESCO conference on
“Music and Technology”, held in Stockholm in 1970,
Pierre Schaeffer, the founding father of musique
concrète, also addressed the nature of this relationship
between sound and music, in terms of the body’s rela-
tionship to the tool: in his case the computer, for our pur-
poses extended to include the notion of the digital net-
work. Schaeffer characterises the nature of the collabora-
tion between the musician and the other thing that makes
the sound -
It is true ... that … the more man communicates with
the sound ... the more man communicates with himself.
[16]
This presents the moment of music as a moment of self-
realisation in sound, a moment which asserts the internal
distance which allows a being knowledge of itself as an
actor in the world. It proposes music first as a private,
rather than a public act. But it also gives a powerful im-
age of the human as constituted by relationships within a
network and as determined by a response to the sounding
world.
For Schaeffer, the network clearly involves the configu-
ration of human beings and physical tools: in his case,
one could say, the tape recorder and its technologies of
tape. And in recent years a number of younger artists
have rediscovered the original moments of sound tech-
nology, in a moment of creative archaeology. I think for
example of the renewed popular interest in radio and ana-
logue synth ensembles, or the work of Aleks Kolkowski
and others with wax and tin cylinder recording: an inter-
est that has extended even into the popular domain in the
recent releases by artists like Neil Young and Jack White.
Is this a symbolic refusal of the digital?
There seems to me to be little evidence of any Luddite
or reactionary tendencies here, but there is none-the-less
an interesting extension of the hybrid nature of the net-
work, which now abuts the digital and the analogue, the
physical hand-skills of actual materials and the organisa-
tional and algorithmic skills of digital materials in ways
that test the boundaries of sound’s existence for us. This
seeming backward step from the grand vision of ever
more sophisticated computing presents as a stock-taking
of how technologies and humans can interact.
7. WHAT IS SOUND?
In this talk I have tried to think through some of the im-
plications of our current position in a history of music-
making barely sixty years old. This history has unfolded
under the sign of ‘technology’; as if music has not always
been a technological endeavor. But technologies change,
and the computational devices that started this particular
creative trajectory have transformed into actors in a more
complex scenario. In the same way, our very notion of
what an actor is has also changed, and this whole argu-
ment subscribes to a view propounded by Jane Bennett
[2], Bruno Latour [11], Carey Wolfe [21] and others that
seeks to flatten some of the hierarchies that have been
constructed around humans and technologies, and to no-
tice the hybrid nature of the resulting networks.
This flattening has some overtly political and ethical
motivations, particularly in relation to the ecological and
environmental issues that currently confront us. But I
would argue that it also has some actually useful pur-
chase on the necessary discussions around the nature and
purposes of art, within a social context that is proving
difficult for art, as we have formulated it, to engage with.
As sound is the focus of our attentions, I want to con-
clude by wondering about the implications of such a flat-
tening move for sound, and our future engagements with
it.
In the context of this discussion, sound presents itself
not as perceptual flow or a set of objects, ‘out there’ and
available for human intervention, but rather as a network
of disparate components, unfolding in time. The network
contains, of course, vibrations or signals through a set of
connected media, but also locations within those media
that are themselves connected by constructions of space
that are made by and contain agents, or actors. It is the
roles and identities, both material and immaterial, taken
by those actors, that help to define the nature of the net-
work and its purposes, that are social, material, aesthetic
or economic. The actors, so-called, can be wires, comput-
er code, mobile devices, human beings and so on, each
with some contingent agency. As with any network, this
one can be tapped into at many places, and each point of
tapping yields a different perspective on the nature of the
network itself, its sonic presence, revealing its motives,
its flows of reciprocation, its forces, affects and its spatial
and temporal constructions. What I am trying to get at
here arises out of a composition of machines, objects,
physical phenomena, personae, people, social structures
and tensions, and everything else that constitutes a site
for action.
The purpose of this re-imagining of sound is to attempt
a re-enchantment of our connection with it: to reassert
that the relationships we establish with what we love
cannot be one-way. Relationships pass to and fro in a
communicative rhythm that attests to their health and
vibrancy. As Serres asks, “What do we give back to the
objects of our science, from which we take knowledge?”
[18] Sound is a complex from which, in Tim Ingold’s
words, we should ‘take counsel’ in order to ensure that

our relationship with it and all its wonders continues to
thrive.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to colleagues and students at Edinburgh
College of Art and the Reid School of Music for their
support, and in particular to Simon Frith, Owen Green
and Dimitris Papageorgiou, conversations with whom
helped to shape some of these thoughts.
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