Content uploaded by Bernd Herzogenrath
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Bernd Herzogenrath on Mar 03, 2017
Content may be subject to copyright.
Sonic inking
32677.indb 1 13/10/2016 09:41
thinking|media
Series Editors
Bernd Herzogenrath
Patricia Pisters
32677.indb 2 13/10/2016 09:41
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
NEW YORK • LONDON • OXFORD • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
Sonic inking:
A Media Philosophical
Approach
Edited by
Bernd Herzogenrath
32677.indb 3 13/10/2016 09:41
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square
New York London
NY 10018 WC1B 3DP
USA UK
www.bloomsbury.com
BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc
First published 2017
© Bernd Herzogenrath, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
Names: Herzogenrath, Bernd, 1964– author.
Title: Sonic thinking : a media philosophical approach / Bernd Herzogenrath.
Description: New York, NY, USA : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of
Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc, [2017] | Series: Thinking media |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016034486 (print) | LCCN 2016048410 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501327209 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501327179 (ePDF) |
ISBN 9781501327186 (ePUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Sound (Philosophy) | Thought and thinking. | Mass media.
Classification: LCC B105.S59 H47 2017 (print) | LCC B105.S59 (ebook) |
DDC 10–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034486
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2720-9
ePub: 978-1-5013-2718-6
ePDF: 978-1-5013-2717-9
Series: thinking|media
Cover design: Catherine Wood
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in the United States of America
32677_00_FM.indd 4 21/10/2016 14:36
Acknowledgments vii
Contributors viii
1 sonic thinking—An Introduction Bernd Herzogenrath 1
2 Time|Place|Memory: Artistic Research as a Form
of inking-rough-Media Krien Clevis 23
sonic thought i
Walking into Sound Lasse-Marc Riek 41
3 Soundscape as a System and an Auditory Gestalt
Sabine Breitsameter 51
4 Memories of Memories of Memories of Memories:
Remembering and Recording on the Silent
Mountain Angus Carlyle 65
sonic thought ii
aumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and
Non-inking omas Köner 83
sonic thought iii
e Sounds of ings Heiner Goebbels 87
5 Sonic ought Christoph Cox 99
6 in|human rhythms Bernd Herzogenrath 111
7 Sound Without Organs: Inhuman Refrains and the
Speculative Potential of a Cosmos-Without-Us
Jason Wallin and Jessie Beier 135
8 Buzzing off . . . Toward Sonic inking Christoph Lischka 159
Contents
32677.indb 5 13/10/2016 09:41
vi Contents
9 Sound Beyond Nature | Sound Beyond Culture, or: Why is
the Prague Golem Mute? Jakob Ullmann 181
10 One Dimensional Music Without Context or
Meaning Mark Fell 193
11 How to ink Sonically? On the Generativity of
the Flesh Holger Schulze 217
12 Immanent Non-Musicology: Deleuze|Guattari
vs. Laruelle Achim Szepanski 243
13 Sonic Figure: e Sound of e Black So Julia Meier 257
14 Images of ought | Images of Music Adam Harper 269
15 Digital Sound, ought Aden Evens 281
sonic thought iv
Sonotypes Sebastian Scherer 309
Index 317
32677.indb 6 13/10/2016 09:41
I would like to express my gratitude to bloomsbury (in particular the
wonderful Katie Gallof and Mary Al-Sayed) for giving us and me the
opportunity to publish this book, and to all those wonderful people that
contributed to this volume—it has been a pleasure! Special thanks go
out to Sebastian Scherer, for all the work you have put into this!
I dedicate this book to Janna and Claudia, and to the memory of
Frank.
Two- and-a- half of the essays in this book had a previous life in online-
journals, in slightly different versions:
Christoph Cox’s essay appeared as slightly different versions in Artpulse
16 (2013) and Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey,
and Suhail Malik (Berlin: Sternberg Press 2015).
Achim Szepanski’s essay also appeared in a slightly different version in
Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail
Malik (Berlin: Sternberg Press 2015).
A small part of Bernd Herzogenrath’s essay already appeared as “e
‘Weather of Music’: Sounding Nature in the 20th and 21st Centuries,”
Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan 2009, 216–32.
. . . all republished with kind permission.
Acknowledgments
32677.indb 7 13/10/2016 09:41
Jessie Beier is a teacher, artist, and independent scholar based in
Edmonton, Alberta. Beier completed a Masters Degree in Curriculum
Studies in 2014 with the thesis project “Schizophrenizing the Art
Encounter: Towards a Politics of Dehabituation.” Beier’s interests in
both visual and sonic ecologies have led to a research and writing
practice that works to think art, in its many forms, as a power for
overturning cliché and dismantling common sense habits of
interpretation. Beier has worked in a variety of settings as a researcher,
educator, and program developer and currently teaches in the
Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta. In
addition to her scholarly work, Beier is also a practising artist and
musician, working mainly in video and sound installation. Beier has
presented her research locally and nationally, and has published writing
in Visual Arts Research (University of Illinois Press), e Journal of
Curriculum and Pedagogy (Taylor and Francis), and e Alberta Journal
of Educational Research (University of Alberta).
Sabine Breitsameter is an expert on experimental electroacoustic
art forms. She has been working since the mid-1980s for German
public radio within the field of radio drama and documentary as
author, director and dramaturge, and as a festival director and curator
for, e.g., Documenta/Kassel, Academy of Arts/Berlin, Ars Electronica/
Linz, and ZKM Karlsruhe. As a professor for “Sound and Media
Culture” she researches and teaches at Hochschule Darmstadt/Germany
since 2006. She co- founded the Master program “Soundstudies” at
the University of Arts Berlin, where she worked as a guest professor
for Experimental Audiomedia from 2004 to 2008. Her publications
include ”Die Ordnung der Klänge“ (Schott International 2010): a new
German edition and translation of R. Murray Schafer’s e Tuning
of the World, writings on listening culture, audiomedia history, and
Contributors
32677.indb 8 13/10/2016 09:41
ixContributors
currently on her research project in progress exploring 3D audio and
360° cinema.
Angus Carlyle is a researcher at CRiSAP at the University of the Arts,
London, where he is Professor of Sound and Landscape. He edited the
book Autumn Leaves (2007), co- edited On Listening (2013) and
co- wrote In e Field (2013). His art works have included 51° 32′ 6.954″
N/0° 00′ 47.0808″ W (2008), Noli Me Tangere (2009), Some Memories of
Bamboo (2009) and Air Pressure (2011–2013), a collaboration with
anthropologist Rupert Cox. His new project with Cox, Zawawa (2015–)
extends Carlyle’s fascination with the heard world of people and place,
memory and presence. In 2016, A Downland Index, a book-length
experiment in nature writing was published by uniformbooks and the
album In e Shadow of the Silent Mountains, an intersection between
text, image and sound, was released by Gruenrekorder.
www.anguscarlyle.com
Krien Clevis has been active as an artist, researcher and curator. As a
professor in the Arts Faculty Maastricht, she teaches Artistic Research
in the Fine Arts department. She is involved in a post- doc project at the
Lectureship Autonomy and Public Sphere in the Arts at the same
faculty. In Rome she has performed research on the Via Appia, in
collaboration with archaeological researchers from Radboud University
Nijmegen and the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome (KNIR). She earned
a PhD by writing a dissertation, entitled LOCVS. Herinnering en
vergankelijkheid in de verbeelding van plaats: van Italische domus naar
artistiek environment/LOCVS. Memory and Transience in the
Representation of Place: From Italic Domus to Artistic Environment
(Amsterdam: Jan de Jong/De Buitenkant 2013). is PhD project was
devoted to artistic research of the notion of quality of “place,” through a
consideration of archaeological and other debates on place and study of
the physical and qualitative features of place, especially in historical
sites. As an artist she creates new places of meaning: places caught
within a dynamics of change and subject to being overwritten all
32677.indb 9 13/10/2016 09:41
xContributors
the time. Major concepts in her research are genius loci, palimpsest and
lieux de mémoire. By combining artistic, historical/archaeological and
personal exploration of locations, she aims to add new meanings to the
multilayered dimension of places.
Christoph Cox is Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College and
visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He is
the author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (forthcoming)
and Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (California, 1999) and
co- editor of Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg 2015) and Audio
Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum 2004). e recipient of
an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, Cox
is editor- at-large at Cabinet magazine. His writing has appeared in
October, Artforum, Journal of the History of Philosophy, e Wire,
Journal of Visual Culture, Organised Sound, e Review of Metaphysics,
and elsewhere. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts
Museum Houston, e Kitchen, New Langton Arts, the G Fine Art
Gallery, and the Brick & Mortar International Video Art Festival.
Aden Evens is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College in
Hanover, New Hampshire. His research and teaching zig- zags across
disciplinary lines, drawing on training in music, mathematics, soware
engineering, and philosophy. His 2005 monograph, Sound Ideas
(University of Minnesota Press), takes a phenomenological and
technological approach to the study of music, helping to usher in the
nascent field of sound studies. His book, Logic of the Digital (Bloomsbury
Academic 2015), traces the potentials and pitfalls of digital technologies
by examining their underlying technical bases. If there is a piano, Aden
will probably play it, which is either delightful or annoying, depending
on how far away you are sitting.
Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield (UK). Aer
studying experimental film and video art at Sheffield City Polytechnic
he initially reverted to earlier interests in computational technology,
32677.indb 10 13/10/2016 09:41
xiContributors
music, and synthetic sound. In 1998 he began a series of critically
acclaimed record releases on labels including Mille Plateaux, Line,
Editions Mego and Raster Noton. Fell is widely known for combining
popular music styles, such as electronica and club musics, with typically
academic approaches to computer- based composition with a particular
emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. Since his early
electronic music pieces Fell’s practice has expanded to include moving
image works, sound and light installation, choreography, critical texts
and educational projects.
e diversity and importance of Fell’s practice is reflected in the
range and scale of international institutions that have presented his
work, which include: Hong Kong National Film archive, e Baltic
(Gateshead), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, La Casa
Encendida (Madrid), Laboral (XIxon), e Institute of Contemporary
Art (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), e Serpentine (London),
e Australian Centre For Moving Image, Artists Space (NYC), Issue
Project Room (NYC), Corcoran (D C), Curtis R.Priem Experimental
Media and Performing Arts Center (NY), Lampo/Graham Foundation
for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago), Zentrum für Kunst
und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), Hanger Biccoca (Milan) and
others. Fell’s work is in the collection of the yssen-Bornemisza Art
Contemporary (Vienna) and has also been recognized by ARS
Electronica (Linz).
Heiner Goebbels (born 1952) graduated in sociology and music. e
German composer and director has created music theater works and
staged concerts, radio works, and compositions for ensemble and for
big orchestras (Surrogate Cities). As a composer he collaborates with the
finest ensembles, orchestras, and conductors. Since the beginning of the
1990s he composed and directed unique and celebrated music theater
works such as Black on White (1996), Max Black (1998), Eislermaterial
(1998), Hashirigaki (2000), Landscape with distant relatives (2002),
Eraritjaritjaka (2004), Stiers Dinge (2007), Songs of Wars I have seen
(2007), I went to the house but did not enter (2008) and When the
32677.indb 11 13/10/2016 09:41
xii Contributors
Mountain changed its clothing (2012), which have been presented at the
most important festivals in Europe, South- and North America,
Australia and Asia. He created installative works for the Centre
Pompidou Paris, MAC Lyon, Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Documenta
Kassel, and others. In the last few years he has directed the rarely staged
operas Europeras 1&2 by John Cage (2012), Delusion of the Fury by
Harry Partch (2013), and De Materie by Louis Andriessen (2014).
Heiner Goebbels is Professor at the Institute for Applied eatre
Studies of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen and President of
eatre Academy Hessen and has been awarded with many international
record-, radio-, theater- and music- awards, the International Ibsen
Award 2012, and with an honorary doctorate by Birmingham City
University. From 2012 to 2014 he was artistic director of the
“Ruhrtriennale—International Festival of the Arts.” Many CDs were
released by ecm- records (two Grammy nominations); publications
include Komposition als Inszenierung (2002) and Aesthetics of Absence
(2015). Heiner Goebbels lives in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
For more information see: www.heinergoebbels.com
Adam Harper is a musicologist who recently completed his PhD on
lo- fi aesthetics at the University of Oxford. He is also a music critic
writing for e Wire, e FADER, and others, and is the author of
Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making
(Zero Books 2011), which argues for a reappraisal of modernist
aesthetics and offers an infinitely flexible ontology of music based on
variables and information. He has also written pamphlets on the future
of music for the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts and, for
London publisher Precinct, on underground pop music (Heaven is
Real: John Maus and the Truth of Pop) and introduced and supervised a
new English edition of a 1916 progressive musical manifesto by
Ferruccio Busoni, Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music. He has given
talks and seminars at the Darmstadt Summer School of Music,
the Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaen, Vienna, and e
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University; he
32677.indb 12 13/10/2016 09:41
xiiiContributors
has spoken at the All Tomorrow’s Parties and CTM Berlin festivals, for
Subba Cultcha in Brussels and Amsterdam, and for the Guardian Music
Weekly Podcast; and has contributed to panel discussions hosted by
e Wire, the South Bank Centre, Verso Books, Warwick University and
the University of East London.
Bernd Herzogenrath is professor of American literature and culture at
Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He is the author of An
Art of Desire. Reading Paul Auster (Rodopi 2001), An American
Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (Dartmouth College Press 2010)
and editor of two books on Tod Browning, two books on Edgar G.
Ulmer, and two books on Deleuze and Ecology. Other edited collections
include e Farthest Place: e Music of John Luther Adams
(Northeastern UP 2012), Time and History in Deleuze and Serres
(Continuum 2012), and, most recently, media|matter (Bloomsbury
2014). At the moment, he is planning a project cinapses: thinking|film
that brings together scholars from film studies, philosophy, and the
neurosciences (members include Alva Noë and Antonio Damasio).
Forthcoming publications include the edited collections e Films of
Bill Morrison (Amsterdam University Press), and film as philosophy
(University of Minnesota Press).
omas Köner (born 1965 in Bochum, Germany) studied at the
Musikhochschule Dortmund and CEM Studio Arnhem. He is a
distinctive figure in the fields of contemporary music and multimedia
art. For more than three decades his work has been internationally
recognized and he excels in all the areas of his artistic activity, receiving
awards such as Golden Nica Ars Electronica (Linz), Transmediale
Award (Berlin), Best Young Artist at ARCO (Madrid), and many more.
His familiarity with both the visual and sonic arts resulted in
numerous commissions to create music for silent films for the
Auditorium du Musée du Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou,
and others. Likewise, he created installations for diverse situations, for
example ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art and the
32677.indb 13 13/10/2016 09:41
xiv Contributors
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Santiago de Chile, to name but two. His
works are part of the collections of significant museums such as Musée
national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou Paris, and Musée d’art
contemporain, Montréal.
omas Köner is continuing his close relationship with sound art by
creating radiophonic works for the national radio in Germany
(Deutschlandradio Kultur, WDR Studio Akustische Kunst), while also
working as a live performer, composer and producer. His music
compositions from the early 1990s, including albums Permafrost,
Nunatak, and Teimo, were considered pioneering in the field of minimal
electronics and are still in print. Köner’s acclaimed production skills
with his more beat- oriented duo partner Porter Ricks, whose album
Biokinetics is considered “a classic of techno sound,” resulted in remix
commissions for amongst others Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails.
Christoph Lischka studied Composition, Piano, Musicology,
Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics at the Hochschule für Musik
(Cologne), University of Cologne, and University of Bonn. He has
worked as a programmer, soware engineer, research scientist, artist,
and university lecturer at several institutions, e.g., Hochschule für
Musik in Aix- la-Chapelle (Music eory), University of Cologne
(Musicology), Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Art- related Sciences), and
University of the Arts Bremen (Digital Media).
He was a member of several scientific societies; (co-)organizer of
many national and international conferences and workshops; and has
many publications in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Music eory,
Foundations of Cognitive Science, Media eory, and Philosophy. From
1986 to 1998 he was senior research scientist and group leader at
Fraunhofer Research Institute (St. Augustine) in the fields of artificial
intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics. From 1998 to 2005 he worked
as a freelancing information architect and web developer, from 2005 to
2007 he was visiting professor at the University of the Arts Bremen
(Digital Media, Robotics, Media eory); and from 2007 to 2009 Professor
at the University of the Arts Bremen (Autoactive Systems).
32677.indb 14 13/10/2016 09:41
xvContributors
Since 2010 he is an independent researcher and university lecturer in
the field of poietic machines (a continuation of the newly established
research in Autoactive Systems), where the focus is primarily on the
interplay of philosophy, mathematics, computer sciences, sound art, and
“convergent technologies,” particularly robotics and nanobiotechnology.
Christoph Lischka lives in Frankfurt am Main (Germany).
Julia Meier, PhD, is a lecturer and freelance writer who has worked in
the field of contemporary art, film, fashion, philosophy, and music in
Germany and in the United States. She is the recipient of several
academic awards including the PhD fellowship of the German
Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Meier was a visiting scholar at
the Department of Comparative Studies at Stony Brook University,
New York, where she conducted her doctoral research on David Lynch
and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the logic of sensation. She has published
various essays about the work of Gilles Deleuze, Diamanda Galás, Chris
Cunningham, and Matthew Barney, among others.
Meier taught at Leibnitz University Hannover, Germany, Carl von
Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany, as well as at Stony Brook
University, New York. She also worked as a curator for contemporary
art at the Kestnergesellscha Hanover, Germany. Her book Die Tiefe der
Oberfläche (e Depth of the Surface): Lynch, Bacon, Deleuze has been
published by Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin, Germany (2013).
Lasse-Marc Riek (born 1975 in Germany) uses different forms of
expression in his production methods. His works are interdisciplinary
and can be conceived as groups of works of both visual art (action
and conceptual art) and sound art. His art of sound can be described
in terms such as acoustic ecology, bio acoustics and soundscapes.
Here, Riek uses acoustic field recordings, storing them with different
recording media, editing, archiving, and presenting them in different
contexts.
Since 1997, he has operated internationally with exhibitions, releases,
concerts, lectures, workshops, awards, and projects and given guest
32677.indb 15 13/10/2016 09:41
xvi Contributors
performances in galleries, art museums, churches, and universities. He
has made contributions in the public media as well as in podcasts and
received scholarships and artist- in-residence programs realized in
Europe and Africa. Since 2003 he is founding member of the audio
publishing company Gruenrekorder, focusing on soundscapes, field
recordings, and electro- acoustic compositions, and in this function,
dealing internationally with artists and scientists.
www.lasse- marc-riek.de and www.gruenrekorder.de
Sebastian Scherer completed his MA in Art History and American
Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2010. He subsequently
taught International Journalism at the University for Applied Sciences
in Darmstadt. Since 2011 he works as a scientific assistant for the
American Studies department at Goethe University, where he teaches
classes on American Avant- garde Music, the Electronic Frontier, and
American Landscape Painting and Photography. His research interests
include sound- studies, modern and contemporary art, music, and film,
as well as audio- engineering, and American countercultures. Currently
he is working on his PhD project on the artistic strategies of Christian
Marclay.
Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of
Copenhagen as well as Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab.
He is the author of a generative theory of artifacts in three volumes: Das
aleatorische Spiel (2000), Heuristik (2005), and Intimität und Medialität
(2012). His research focuses on the cultural history of the senses, on
a historical anthropology of media, and on sound in popular culture.
He serves as founding editor of the “Sound Studies”- book series and
as curator for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin. His recent
publications are: Sabotage! (ed., 2013), Gespür (2014), American Progress
(2015), and Sound as Popular Culture (ed., 2016).
Achim Szepanski was born in Karlsruhe and studied Sociology in
Frankfurt/Main. During the 1980s and 1990s he founded electronic
32677.indb 16 13/10/2016 09:41
xviiContributors
music labels such as Force Inc., Mille Plateaux, Ritornell, Position
Chrome and forcetracks. He wrote essays about Adorno, Marx, Deleuze|
Guattari, Laruelle, etc. His latest work contains a trilogy of novels (Saal
6, Pole Position, and Verliebt ins Gelingen) and theoretical work. In 2014
he published with Laika the first two volumes of Capitalization
(Vol.1—Marx Non-Economy; Vol.2—Non Economy of Contemporary
Capitalism). e third volume, Der Non-Marxismus: Finance, Maschinen,
Dividuum was published in 2016.
Jakob Ullmann was born in 1958 in Freiberg in Saxony, studied church
music and organ in Dresden (with Hans-Jürgen Scholze), took private
lessons in composition with Friedrich Goldmann in Berlin, and in 2005
completed his DPhil (with Hannes Böhringer) in Braunschweig. Since
2008 he is professor for composition, musical notation, and music
theory at the Musikakademie der Stadt Basel, Hochschule für Musik.
Jason Wallin is Associate Professor of Media and Youth Culture Studies
in Curriculum at the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta,
Canada, where he teaches courses in visual art, popular culture, and
cultural curriculum theory. Jason is author of A Deleuzian Approach
to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life (Palgrave Macmillan),
co- author of Arts-Based Research: A Critique and Proposal (with Jan
Jagodzinski, Sense Publishers), co- editor of Educational, Psychological,
and Behavioral Considerations in Niche Online Communities (with
Vivek Venkatesh, Juan Carlos Castro, and Jason Lewis, IGI Press), and
co- editor of Deleuze, Guattari, Politics and Education (with Matt Carlin,
Bloomsbury). Jason is assistant editor for the Journal of Curriculum and
Pedagogy (Routledge).
32677.indb 17 13/10/2016 09:41
32677.indb 18 13/10/2016 09:41
I would like to start with a set of resonances. First of all, a resonance
on the word “resonance”—on the one hand it means something like
“echo,” or “reverberation,” on the other hand, the word “reason” is
somehow hidden in “resonance.” e French verb résonner makes this
resonance even stronger—one might even be tempted to invent the
word re[a]sonance here.
us, a kind of knowledge is involved here. A kind of thinking—
maybe not what we would call rational thinking, but a kind of thinking
nonetheless. As the Polish philosopher and mathematician Józef
Hoëné-Wronski has it, as quoted by Edgar Varèse: “Music is the
corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound” (Varèse 1966: 17).
Music as the becoming- body of the knowledge of sound—sound
thinking.
Again, also this knowledge that sound is, has a highly interesting
resonance in its “wordhood” in French: connaître—knowledge as a
process of “being- born-with”—this could mean that this knowledge,
this thinking, this re[a]sonance, that sound is not a knowledge about
the world, coming to you only in retrospective reflection, but a thinking
of and in the world, a part of the world we live in, intervening in the
world directly.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in his unpublished early notebooks, dating
from the period of his Unfashionable Observations (1872–3), relates the
true philosopher to the scientist and the artist as listener: “e concept
of the philosopher . . . : he tries to let all the sounds of the world
reverberate in him and to place this comprehensive sound outside
himself into concepts” (19[71], 115); whereas the artist lets the tones of
1
sonic thinking—An Introduction
Bernd Herzogenrath
32677.indb 1 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking2
the world resonate within him and projects them by means of percepts
and affects. So, here, sound- art practice becomes research and
philosophy, and vice versa.
Rainer Maria Rilke, in his 1919 essay “Primal Sound” (Urgeräusch in
the German original) described an experience he had as a young
boy, when introduced to a phonograph for the first time, seeing how
the needle produced sounds out of grooves in a wax cylinder,
grooves that the recording of actual sounds had put there in the first
place. Years later, while attending anatomical lectures in Paris, Rilke
connected the lines of coronal suture of the human skull to his
childhood observations—“I knew at once what it reminded me of: one
of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax
cylinder by the point of a bristle!” (2001: 22). From this incident, Rilke
derives the following “experimental set- up”: “e coronal suture of the
skull (this would first have to be investigated) has—let us assume—
a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a
phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the
apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return
journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic
translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally—well: to put it
plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?”
(23). Rilke’s obvious answer, is, of course, noise, music—sound! Probing
further, Rilke asks himself, “What variety of lines then, occurring
anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any
contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then
experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of
sense?” (23).
In a letter, Rilke specifies this idea. Writing to Dieter Bassermann,
Rilke speculates on “set[ting] to sound the countless signatures of
Creation which in the skeleton, in minerals . . . in a thousand places
persist in their remarkable versions and variations. e grain in wood,
the gait of an insect: our eye is practiced in following and ascertaining
them. What a gi to our hearing were we to succeed in transmuting this
zigzag . . . into auditory events!” (2007: 391–2).
32677.indb 2 13/10/2016 09:41
Introduction 3
e project “sonic thinking” aims to serve two interconnected
purposes: on the one hand it wants to develop an alternative philosophy
of music that takes music seriously as a “form of thinking” (and that
might revise our notion of what “thinking” means). On the other hand,
it aims to bring this approach into a fertile symbiosis with the concepts
and practices of “artistic research”: art, philosophy, and science as
heterogeneous, yet co- equal forms of thinking and researching (and let
me point out that we are using the concept of “artistic research” not in
the meaning of art being a handmaiden subordinate to [and evaluated
by] parameters of the sciences [a highly debatable practice], but more
as a mediaphilosophical praxeology—artists [in this case: sound artists]
thinking with and through their medium [in this case: sound]).
e debate about the sphere of sound is presently fought with high
intensity. e emerging field of research “Sound Studies” is primarily
discussed in the humanities and social sciences—the “Acoustic Turn” is
tackled with the means of cultural sciences and semiotics. ese
disciplines are however based on foundations that could not be more
alien to music (or sound, noise—the “sonic field’). Deeply rooted in one
of the major strands of western philosophy, the concepts of cultural
studies and especially semiotics are based on what Gilles Deleuze
calls “image of thought,” dependent on the metaphysics of being,
representation, and identity. Accordingly, a (passive) nature, matter, etc.,
is “informed” extrinsically, a substance affects existence, the subject
organizes (the objects of) experience, progress determines the course of
history, etc.
On the other hand, how Hans Jonas, among others, has demonstrated
in his groundbreaking essay, “e Nobility of Sight” (1954) these
foundations of western existential philosophy are in turn rooted in the
ubiquity of a “visual regime”: a hierarchy of senses was established, in
which the eye almost inevitably was declared the origin and foundation
of all philosophy—central categories like “[in]finity,” “distance,”
“abstraction,” and “objectivity,” are indebted to the intrinsic sensory
qualities of visual perception. Since the twilight of the nineteenth
century the consequences of this hierarchization of the senses (and the
32677.indb 3 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking4
“supremacy” of the eye) are discussed with increasing intensity. In his
treatise about the origin of tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche tried to regain
the “aural culture” of the old, pre- platonic Greeks, and in a later note he
hinted at the revolutionary implications for our culture, which a
reorientation away from the eye towards the ear would trigger: “Images
in the human eye! is governs the entire nature of the human being:
from the eye! Subject! e ear hears sound! An entirely different,
marvelous conception of the same world!” (19[66]: 25). Here Nietzsche
is congruent with the bigger part of twentieth- century theoretical
reflection, that deems the prioritization of the visual sense as the
original sin of western thinking.
As Jonas further explains, the concept of “simultaneity”—and
eventually of “identity”—is an effect of the visual regime: visual
perception constitutes a “co- temporaneous manifold . . . at rest” (1954:
507), the sense of hearing however “construct[s its] perceptual unities
out of a temporal sequence of sensations” (ibid.). us the eye suggests
the notion of a permanent existence we would not have, if we could
merely resort to “time- senses” (like hearing and feeling).
Music and sound, however, can also be considered the “other” of this
ontology of being and the visual regime—ephemeral, a time- art, non-
visual. So what could be the nature of a “sound thinking”? Initially one
would have to oppose (or accompany) the predominant discourses in
sound studies to a philosophy that is process- orientated: an ontology
of becoming, not of being, which recognizes entities as events and
contingent actualizations of virtual potentiality, as a flow consisting of
“variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds . . .
phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or . . . of acceleration and
rupture” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3–4); an “alternative” philosophical
lineage, which relies on thinkers like Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze. is perspective transforms “givens”
with a preset and stable taxonomy of particular functions and agencies
into “a construction site of exploration and connection” (Cox 2003: 3).
From this vantage point, the rigorous division between aesthetics
and research (and the likewise rigorous division between the various
32677.indb 4 13/10/2016 09:41
Introduction 5
related [academic] disciplines, e.g., “art” and “science”) can no longer be
seriously upheld.
Deleuze is also interested in “the relations between the arts, science,
and philosophy. ere is no order of priority among those disciplines”
(1995: 123) for Deleuze. Whereas science involves the creation of
functions, of a propositional mapping of the world, and art involves the
creation of blocs of sensation (or affects and percepts), philosophy
involves the invention of concepts. According to Deleuze|Guattari,
philosophy, art, and science are defined by their relation to chaos.
Whereas science “relinquishes the infinite in order to gain reference”
(1994: 197), by creating definitions, functions and propositions, art, on
the other hand, “wants to create the finite that restores the infinite”
(197). In contrast, “philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it
consistency” (197).
Yet, since “sciences, arts, and philosophies are equally creative” (5), it
might be fruitful, as Deleuze proposes, “to pose the question of echoes
and resonances between them” (1995: 123)—that is, to pose the question
of their ecology.
As Deleuze specified in one of his seminars, “Between a philosophical
concept, a painted line and a musical sonorous bloc, resonances
emerge, very, very strange correspondences that one shouldn’t even
theorize, I think, and which I would prefer to call ‘affective’ . . . these are
privileged moments” (“Image Mouvement Image Temps”).1 ese
moments privilege an affect where thought and sensation merge into a
very specific way of “doing thinking” beyond representation and
categorization.
e hiatus of art and research is the result of the idea of a linear
process ranging from invention|concept (mental) to design (material
realization). is however does not do justice to the complexity of
the matter: mental and corporeal processes and interactions as well
as “implicit/tacit/practical knowledge” become relevant on all levels,
for all decisions. As Martin Tröndle has pointed out, conceptual
cognitive and manual affective activities go hand in hand, the sensual
examination of the material and emotional reactivity is also of highest
32677.indb 5 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking6
importance. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in their idea of the “artisan”
(rather than the “artist”): “It is a question of surrendering to the
[materiality], then following where it leads by connecting operations to
a materiality, instead of imposing a form on matter: what one addresses
is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos”
(1987: 408).
e mind is tightly embedded into the interplay between body,
environment, and matter. is is the quintessence of Embodied Mind
Philosophy. Alva Noë, one of its originators, even takes it a significant
step further: for him the mind evolves from the movements of the body
in its environment—the mind is not a substance that could be simply
located within the confines of our skull. Consciousness is not “something
that happens in us, like digestion”—it is rather “something we do . . . a
kind of living activity . . . the ways in which each of us . . . carries on the
process of living with and in response to the world around us” (2009: 7).
Embodied Mind Philosophy, I argue, can stimulate a fertile
resonance with the concept of artistic research: the artistic practice
is here not (only) understood in terms of the finalized work of art
(work- aesthetic), but rather in regard to the practices and strategies
of artistic production (production- aesthetic). e process of the
emergence of a work becomes the center of attention. Artists
comprehend this process as the phase of examination or evolution of a
work. With this shi from the work to artistic research comes also an
altered handling of the work itself. It has become a medium of insight,
at the latest since twentieth- century’s Modernity (cf., e.g., Clement
Greenberg). e work materializes knowledge—beyond the aesthetic
experience it facilitates comprehension of the world. Making art then
means, initially programmatically in general, to explore something with
the specific means of art, to discover something about the world. is
entails that art does not solely comprehend itself as a medium of
representation and that artistic production does not solely revolve
around questions of depiction. is alleged reduction of the artistic to a
mere tool serving questions of content, turns out to be an actual
extension far beyond self- occupation and the function of representation.
32677.indb 6 13/10/2016 09:41
Introduction 7
e artistic position does not ignore the dimension of aesthetic
experience; it rather collaborates with it and perceives it as a mode of
negotiable understanding.
Not to be mistaken: it is not that art morphs into science. Art and
science are rather poised in a force field of “mutual becoming.” As Julian
Klein has noted, “[a]rtistic experience is an active, constructive and
aesthetic process, in which mode and substance are fused inseparably.
is differs from other implicit knowledge, which generally can be
considered and described separately from its acquisition” (2010: 4)—
(cf., e.g., John Dewey, Michael Polanyi, Gilles Deleuze, etc.). e
reflection of artistic research occurs on the plane of artistic experience
itself. is neither excludes an interpretation on a descriptive plane, nor
a theoretical analysis on a meta- level. It is however a false conclusion to
assume that reflection is only possible from the exterior: artistic
experience is a form of reflection. And affect- driven artistic production
can arrive at more singular thought- positions than purely rationally
organized philosophical systems of thought.
In the [American] musical avant- garde of the twentieth century
these perspectives of music as a contraction of forces, currents, and
speeds, coalesce with the notion of music as thinking, music as
research—again, the “corporealization of the intelligence that is in
sound” (Varèse and Wen- chung 1966: 17). Varèse did not describe
himself as a composer, or musician, but rather as “a worker in rhythms,
frequencies, and intensities” (18). Without any interest whatsoever in
traditional categories like melody, pitch, or form, Varèse turned to
sound itself, the exploration of tone, timbre, and volume.
When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it,
the movement of sound- masses, of shiing planes, will be clearly
perceived in my work, taking the place of the linear counterpoint.
When these sound- masses collide, the phenomena of penetration and
repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on
certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at
different speeds and at different angles. ere will no longer be the old
conception of melody or interplay of melodies. e entire work will be
32677.indb 7 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking8
a melodic totality. e entire work will flow as a river flows. . . . In these
moving masses you would be conscious of their transmutations when
they pass over different layers, when they penetrate certain opacities,
or are dilated in certain rarefactions.
Varèse and Wen- chung 1966: 11–12
To regard “form as a point of departure, a pattern to be followed, a mold
to be filled” (16)—as being, as object—would be a mistake. Referring to
Busoni, Varèse postulates, “Form is a result—the result of a process”
(ibid.), a process of an impersonal becoming, that is rather comparable
to the formation of crystals than to any kind of “subjective intuition.”
Also John Cage, Morton Feldman, the Minimalists, etc., committed
themselves to the musical exploration of the virtual and processual field
of music, to the liberation from human subjectivity towards a realm of
the experience of sound itself (cf. also Cox 2003).
As mediated by John Cage, a better part of the American musical
avant- garde refers to the philosopher Henry David oreau, who
conducted sound experiments at Walden Pond in the mid- nineteenth
century.
In 1851, oreau notes an acoustic experience in his journals that
reveals his particular sensibility to his sonic environment: “Yesterday
and to- day the stronger winds of autumn have begun to blow, and
the telegraph harp has sounded loudly . . . the tone varying with the
tension of different parts of the wire. e sound proceeds from near
the posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid” (1962, III: 11).
Far from being an isolated case, oreau focuses on the “sound of
nature”—and in particular the “sound of the weather”—in various
other entries in his journals: “Nature makes no noise. e howling
storm, the rustling leaf, the pattering rain are no disturbance, there is
an essential and unexplored harmony in them” (1962, I: 12). oreau is
exploring the audible world like a sound- archaeologist, carefully
distinguishing “sound” from “music:”2 To fellow-Transcendentalist
Emerson, mind, not matter, is of prime importance—matter is only a
manifestation of the mind. oreau, in contrast, stresses the material
and sensual aspects of nature—“We need pray for no higher heaven
32677.indb 8 13/10/2016 09:41
Introduction 9
than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life . . . Is not
Nature . . . that of which she is commonly taken to be a symbol merely?”
(1998: 307). oreau does not read nature like, does not interpret nature
according to a spiritual principle external to it—such a principle,
because of nature’s manifoldness, is immanent to it. For oreau,
nature’s “music” is “the sound of circulation in nature’s veins” (1962, I:
251). It is in this stress on nature as sensuous experience and materiality
that oreau “deviates” from Emerson. oreau focuses on [the
music of] nature as a material, physical process, not as an Emersonian
emblem of reason—“e very globe continually transcends and
translates itself. . . . e whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are
still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth” (1973: 306–7).
“Transcendentalism” is understood by oreau completely “physical”—
the natural, dynamic process of metamorphosis, of continuous
change—transcendence becomes immanence.
In his journals, oreau writes: “Now I see the beauty and full
meaning of that word ‘sound.’ Nature always possesses a certain
sonorousness, as in the hum of insects, the booming of ice . . . which
indicates her sound state.” e pun on “sound” as acoustic sound and
“sound” as a state of health even calls for a reference to oreau’s dictum
“in wildness is the preservation of the world” (from his essay “Walking”).
Here “wildness” refers to the untamed but also to anything that resists
representation and any static thinking of identity: the continuous self-
differentiation of the world, its growing, its dynamics, its processuality—
here lies its “soundness” and also the “essence” of sound. us “sound
thinking” does not only imply “the thinking of sound,” but also “healthy
thinking,” or, as Deleuze puts it: a thinking that rightfully earns its
name: a thinking that does not derive its parameters|concepts from an
exterior “verified knowledge” (Deleuze calls this “recognition”) in order
to adapt the object of investigation to these parameters, but rather a
thinking that develops its very concepts from the examination of the
object of investigation (Deleuze calls this “encounter”): here—a
thinking with and by means of sound, not a thinking about sound,
which eventually does not deal with the question what music is, but
32677.indb 9 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking10
rather what music can become. And from this vantage point research
and art, theory and practice, are coextensive.
e following essays explore this realm of sound thinking—essays by
scholars and philosophers, interspersed with “sonic thoughts” from a
more artistic/practitioners’ direction.
Krien Clevis—Time|Place|Memory: Artistic Research as a Form of
inking-rough-Media
Art can be motivated by the desire to map current social issues or
concerns addressed within a particular discourse (without actively
participating in it), while art may also be used to initiate discussion
through the media it produces. Moreover, through its way of showing
things, art establishes a connection with its audience. In this context
Krien Clevis describes the role of art within such discourses as
mediation, whereby art does not merely serve as a vehicle for ideas or
concerns; art also serves to constitute, displace, recreate, change, or
translate them. From this perspective, as well as on the basis of the
artist’s autonomous mode of thinking, art may in fact reveal different or
alternative scientific perspectives and reflect them back on its audience,
users, clients, etc. In their research, artists capitalize on the synergy
between their own artistic practice, the various relevant research
concerns, and the unique interactions involved—while also pursuing
reflection on these aspects. is is where artistic research comes in.
Clevis’s contribution is one of a non- musician. As a visual artist and
researcher, with a PhD in the arts, she specializes in images and their
meaning when researching a specific place. Looking back on her
dissertation project, she shares her views on the meaning of artistic
research. Starting with her visual work, she begins with the end in order
to end with a beginning, or with some rather particular indefinite end,
if such exists at all. Artistic research goes further than that. Before
discussing the role of artistic and historical “sightlines” in her work, she
briefly lingers on its autobiographical sightline.
32677.indb 10 13/10/2016 09:41
Introduction 11
Lasse-Marc Riek—Walking into Sound (sonic thought i)
Lasse-Marc Riek’s essay is an auditive work about natural and mediatized
listening in the landscape. In the spring of 2010 he started to trace
the landscape with his ears and his entire body to develop a grasp for
sound through his own experience. For three days he hiked and listened
for 40 kilometers through the hilly landscape along Rio Paiva in
Portugal, with limited food supplies, sparse equipment, and growing
ears. He wrote about succinct, unspectactular, rare, and familiar sounds.
is is how this readable listening- diary came into being.
Sabine Breitsameter—Soundscape as a System and an Auditory Gestalt
Based on an enigmatic quote by German poet Friedrich Hölderlin
(1770–1843), Sabine Breitsameter’s paper frames both intellectually and
aesthetically the conceptual substructure of the term soundscape, as
coined and published by the Canadian pedagogue, sound researcher and
composer R. Murray Schafer. Relating the term soundscape to Gombrich,
Heidegger, McLuhan, and Weizenbaum, it emerges as a figure of thought,
a mindset, allowing a certain intellectual approach, and an auditory
Gestalt, allowing to perceive and listen in a special, maybe new way. By
this, the term’s deeper dimensions are carved out, thus expanding its
scope from a “green” environmental approach to an existential way of
being and an inevitable pre- requisite of sound thinking.
Angus Carlyle—Memories of Memories of Memories of Memories:
Remembering and Recording on e Silent Mountain
is essay found its catalyst in the Picentini mountain range, in the
hinterland behind Naples and Salerno. Angus Carlyle had been invited
to a residency program by the arts organization Fondazione Aurelio
Petroni and contributed to an exhibition there entitled Viso Come
Territorio (e Face As Territory). Traveling to southern Italy and
returning home over a period of five months sharpened previous
experiences of field recording, particularly in terms of the complex
32677.indb 11 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking12
relations between that sound arts strategy and the operations of
memory. Carlyle proposes an approach that is inspired by addressing
the acoustical functions of sound as themselves “memorial”—in the
sense that sounds remember their origins in a prior release of
mechanical energy and recall the propagation path through which they
have traveled. From that initial impetus, he goes on to consider
recording technologies and techniques as active participants in the
character of sound rather than the transparent, blank forms of
registration they might otherwise be assumed to be. He attempts to
open up the practice of field recording to processes of listening,
remembering and composing which are not staged in linear,
chronological fashion, but which fold back in on each other in iterative
cycles. e cyclical nature of these processes suggests the need to
reconfigure our definition of the field as a discrete, distant territory;
instead, field and home might be connected in a shiing, partial, and
contingent morphology. e essay is populated by short first- person
texts. ese texts perform two tasks: they engage with Wittgenstein’s
fragment on memory from Zettel and adapt his formula to think
through memory- sound, memory- words, and recordings; and they are
mechanisms through which the “remainder” might intrude (a remainder
that is made up of everything from the field that the recorder cannot
capture). Carlyle finishes by projecting an account of two dimensions in
field recording practice: the first internal, connected to the solitary
listening and remembering recordist; the second, external, opening out
to those others who share the expanded field of environmental sound.
omas Köner—aumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and
Non-inking (sonic thought ii)
In his “aumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and Non-inking”
composer and audiovisual artist omas Köner explains a practice of
artistic creation that is based on the tension of place (topos) against the
variety of resonances that arise around it. He understands composition
as a continuum, where a score can be understood as map that charts
degrees of vibrational awareness.
32677.indb 12 13/10/2016 09:41
Introduction 13
Heiner Goebbels—e Sounds of ings (sonic thought iii)
In his essay Heiner Goebbels rethinks the meaning of “e Sound of
ings” in his compositions and theater works of the last thirty- five
years. From manipulated bell sounds in his first tape compositions, the
rhythmic repetition of breaking windows in a sound collage, the looped
sound of high heels walking on a Boston sideway, to the inspiration
drawn from the sound of a writing hand or an espresso pot, Goebbels
describes how things and their sounds have conquered more and more
space in his works. ey impose their own rhythms and dynamics; their
presence influences words, movements, actions; they call for respect
and in the most intriguing moments they break the logic and the
sovereignty of the human performers. By letting the things and their
sounds become more than just illustrations, but rather protagonists,
Goebbels turns traditional hierarchies upside down and ultimately
avoids an anthropomorphic center and identification.
Christoph Cox—Sonic ought
What would it mean to think sonically rather than merely to think
about sound? How can sound alter or inflect philosophy? What concepts
and forms of thought can sound itself generate? ese are the questions
Christoph Cox addresses in this essay. His aim is to track some of the
ways that philosophy has or could be inflected by sound in order to
produce not a philosophy of sound or music but a sonic philosophy.
Sonic philosophy begins not from music as a set of cultural objects but
from the deeper experience of sound as flux, event, and effect.
Bernd Herzogenrath—in|human rhythms
In many ways, the twentieth century can be regarded as art’s attempts to
escape the “tyranny of meter” (the phrase is Robert Schumann’s). In his
essay, Bernd Herzogenrath asks the question if there is a way to think
rhythm otherwise? Maybe the answer to this all- too-human tyranny of
the repetition of the same is something inhuman—in|human rhythms.
With the examples of works by John Luther Adams, David Dunn, and
32677.indb 13 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking14
Richard Reed Parry, this essay tries to show how with the idea of the
human becoming a geological (i.e., non- human) force itself, art has
the responsibility to create an awareness of how we live not only in the
world, but also as part of that world. A music that “performs” these
“cosmic dimensions” of the interdependence of human and non-
human, by focusing on the in|human of the concept “human” might
also teach us something in regard to artistic (or musical) form—these
rhythmic “relations of velocity” ultimately reveal rhythm as the
in|human nonlinear pulsation of “a life.”
Jessie Beyer and Jason Wallin—Sound Without Organs: Inhuman
Refrains and the Speculative Potential of a Cosmos-Without-Us
For its modelization in grade school textbooks, enhanced telescopic
imaging via Hubble, and through Hollywood science fiction settings,
the cosmos has passed into recognizability. Such familiarity might be
said to occur by dint of what acker (2011) refers to as anthropic
subversion, or rather, the territorialization of reality from a distinctly
human- centric point of view. Where the drives of modernism aspire
to the Earth’s refashioning “for- us,” this essay aims to consider the ways
in which anthropic subversion now extends beyond the “blue ruin”
that is modernism’s horrific outcome. From the generalized re- imaging
of space as the new frontier for mining, to the anticipated colonization
of Mars, the alien abyss of space becomes submitted to the will of
human life. Yet for the various ways in which the cosmos has been
habituated to human sensibilities and rendered as a backdrop to our
aesthetic preferences and desires, this essay speculates on a series of
electromagnetic recordings of cosmic objects obtained by the probes
Rosetta and Voyager that invert or subtract a particular teleology linked
to anthropocentric thought.
Deep space interactions of electromagnetic particles, solar winds,
and planetary magnetosphere received by NASA probes Voyager,
INJUN 1, ISEE 1, and HAWKEYE have been translated to reveal a
diversity of inhuman soundscapes.
32677.indb 14 13/10/2016 09:41
Introduction 15
It is along this trajectory that Wallin and Beyer borrow from Murphy
and Smith’s (2001) Deleuzian inflected provocation “[w]hat I hear is
thinking too” for speculative ends. at is, by rejoining thought to such
alien compositions as that of Comet 67P, we might become capable of
relaunching sound along strange non- philosophical vectors in support
of both new problems and horizons for thought.
Christoph Lischka—Buzzing off . . . Toward Sonic inking
For quite some time now there is growing evidence both in the so- called
Cultural Studies as well as in the Sciences that the existing positivist
conceptual frameworks fail in particular areas—they turn out as
inadequate or even incoherent with respect to the existing empirical
data. A prominent example in the Sciences is Quantum Gravity where
heavily established concepts like “space” and “time,” “objectivity,”
“determinism,” etc., are put into question; and for many researchers in
the “Cultural Studies” it feels strange to discuss topics as “affect,”
“emotions,” or “sound” and “voice” under a semiotic regime.
In his essay Christoph Lischka focuses on the concept of Sonic
inking, and will try to understand how existing ontological narratives
eventually turn out to be inappropriate for an adequate investigation of
sonic experience. As an alternative, he outlines a research strategy
oriented at a process- based narrative, drawing on endeavors in fields as
diverse as mathematics, logic, computer science, quantum gravity, and
philosophy. Eventually he reaches a point of convergence where we get
the conceptual apparatus to construct an “ontology” suitably not to
think on sound, but rather to think sound—Sonic inking.
Jakob Ullmann—Sound Beyond Nature/Sound Beyond Culture, or:
Why is the Prague Golem Mute?
Jakob Ullmann’s essay asks—in a more philosophical sense—about the
nature of sound on the background of a situation where listeners cannot
escape sound and sounds. On the one hand sound is used—in present
as in past—for the good and for the evil, sound has in this respect no
32677.indb 15 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking16
protection against (mis-)use. On the other hand sound, especially
because it does not represent anything except itself, cannot become
domesticated without a rest of chaotic, of strange, wild, even awful
primordial powers. e combination with the Greek LOGOS is one
(a partial) answer to the question. It is combined with mythological
knowledge, a message of nowhere, but a message from time in which
the order of the world was not yet disturbed by the order of man. e
early Christians decided to reject “music” to save the WORD. But this
rejection could not prevent that a new sonic art came back from mouths,
pipes, and strings. A Jewish author of the thirteenth century tried to
combine the series of notes called “melody,” to which this new sonic art
changed what formerly was “sound,” with the letter complexes of
creation which are ceaselessly configured by such “melody.” A symbol of
this art of Abraham Aboulafia is the figure of the GOLEM. But the
GOLEM is mute. e magic text of its creation is sound, but the result
of this procedure was not allowed to create an audible resonance in the
creation. Again and again sound stays a question of life and death, even
today; there sound is a nearly valueless coin of every- day experience as
composers from Europe of the last century can testify.
Mark Fell—One Dimensional Music Without Context or Meaning
As a practising artist working with what he calls time- constitutive
processes, Mark Fell has an interest in different descriptions of time
and temporal experience and how these relate to musical structures and
experiences. His essay draws from recent anthropological research and
current philosophical perspectives in order to critique Husserl’s use
of musical metaphors in his account of time- experience. It attempts
to show how Husserl’s position is grounded in a culturally specific
analysis that is both sustained by and embedded within his beliefs
about music, focusing on Husserl’s analogy between temporality and
spatial perspective, and attempts to apply critiques of spatial perspective
to Husserlian temporality. Finally, music production sowares are
discussed. Fell argues that these can be compared to different modes of
32677.indb 16 13/10/2016 09:41
Introduction 17
temporal experience, showing how these both sustain and construct
specific temporal paradigms in response to which creative practice is
structured.
Holger Schulze—How to ink Sonically? On the Generativity of
the Flesh
is essay investigates four major methodological, epistemological and
ontological issues currently at stake in the rapidly expanding,
interdisciplinary research field of sound studies. As research on sound
seeks more and more disciplinary definitions and methodological
trajectories Holger Schulze asks a troubling question concerning the
overall concept of this field: How to think sonically? is question is
investigated by the four connected questions: How to think spatially? How
to think corporeally? How to think beyond logocentrism? How to think
imaginatively? In sound studies, Schulze argues, various efforts to
transform epistemological approaches in cultural theories come together.
erefore the impact of neighboring concepts and approaches is
scrutinized in this essay as well as being put into context to use for research
in sound studies. e author discusses major concepts such as the auditory
dispositif, a possible ontology of vibration or radical empiricism as well as
approaches such as the sociology of spaces, body theory, or aural
architecture; he proposes to sound studies scholars to explore the more
particular research aspects of proprioceptivity, experientiality, and
generaticity as well as a method like writing a sonic fiction.
Achim Szepanski—Immanent Non-Musicology: Deleuze|Guattari vs.
Laruelle
Achim Szepanski’s essay explores the position of Deleuze|Guattari
and Laruelle regarding their concepts on aesthetics and especially of
music, which contain two special forms of non- representationalism.
Deleuze|Guattari and Laruelle agree that representational aesthetics
has come to an end, but they do not agree on what form immanence
should take in aesthetics. While Deleuze|Guattari prefer the productive
32677.indb 17 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking18
capacity of matter, Laruelle insists on the immanent and generic
logic of the Real/One. Laruelle would reject Deleuze and Guattari’s
treatment of music as the capture of affects and percepts (including
relationship between material and forces) and would instead
postulate to music an autonomous theoretical order, a non- scientific
thought according to the radical immanence of the real—the real,
here, understood as foreclosed and indifferent, without mirroring
aesthetics or knowledge or being mirrored by science. Non- musicology
goes from the real to the transcendental, then to the occasion of music.
Sonic thought or non- musicology composes theory as its own object
and therefore delivers a kind of echo to the work of the musicians, to
their way of the becoming- of-music. Laruelle starts to write a new
music- fiction.
Julia Meier—Sonic Figure: e Sound of e Black So
In A ousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari show how a work of art can come into being, how
creative processes can take place, and how this is related to the human
body without representing it, but presenting it as a becoming- other that
has manifested a bloc of sensations of dehumanized “affects and
percepts” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 312–13). In order to describe the
parameters that are necessary to create music or art, they mainly refer
to the biological theses of Jakob von Uexküll, and present their concepts
of “territory” and “refrain,” which they have abstracted from
geographically associated sonic motifs of birds. In order to reflect on
artistic processes that are capable of creating a new sound which has
become something that is no longer recognizable and thus has the
capability to affect us profoundly—an own distinctive style—Julia
Meier examines the music of the New York- based duo e Black So
who succeed in breaking and destroying well known musical patterns
in order to be able to get rid of their cliché functions and thus to create
a kind of abstract sound or form where the cliché has been identified,
but then has been “deterritorialized,” which renders sonorous forces
32677.indb 18 13/10/2016 09:41
Introduction 19
that are not sonorous. What becomes sonorous then in e Black So’s
compositions, is the spasmodic, convulsive rhythm of what could be
characterized as a “hystericized” body. e listener gets viscerally
affected and dragged into this convulsing sound body, thus “becoming”
it him/herself.
Adam Harper—Images of ought | Images of Music
A century aer Luigi Russolo’s futurist manifesto “e Art of Noises”
and following a distrust of such demands, Adam Harper was asked to
write a new musical manifesto, and he chose as its one main assumption
the direct equation of music with thought. Like the thinking that resists
Deleuze’s Image of ought, music must resist the presuppositions of
an Image of Music. Chief among them are definitions of music’s
relationship to sound he critiques as “sonocentric.” Music, rather, should
be considered as a medium of differences not necessarily privileging or
determined by sound(s). It is culturally and psychologically mediated
as multiple “images of music,” however, and music that transcends these
images can be regarded as “modernist,” and is a vital way of reflecting
the emergent subjectivities and collectivities of modernity.
Aden Evens—Digital Sound, ought
“Digital Sound, ought” asks what, if anything, is distinctive about
sound recorded and reproduced using digital technologies. Framing
the analysis around the insistence that sound—based in motion and
heard only in duration—carries with it its past and future, the bulk of
this essay offers an extended examination of the digital, to see what
befalls the essential motion of sound when it is captured as a static
sequence of numbers. e topology of the digital pushes in two opposed
directions, both flattening all digital content into a plane of equivocation
and reaching toward its own outside to discover a significance always
lacking in the digital itself. ese two poles of digital operation are both
modes of abstraction, which is the digital’s chief technique, and both
poles find their model in the bit, which is the principal technology
32677.indb 19 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking20
of the digital. e bit also lends to the digital its possibilistic character:
every bit gets its meaning in part because it might have had the
other value; every 0 could have been a 1 and vice versa. Combinatoric
possibility in the digital substitutes for the open- ended potential of
non- digital objects, with important implications for the nature of sound
in digital culture.
Sebastian Scherer—Sonotypes (sonic thought iv)
In his experimental essay|performance|composition “Sonotypes”
Sebastian Scherer explores various incarnations of his own thought
process during the production of text and sound. By referencing various
scientific and artistic methods of sonification and by taking “sound
thinking” literally he translates his thoughts into sound by exchanging
the computer keyboard with a musical keyboard and a sequencer
program. is self- reflexive modus operandi makes the thought process
audible and suggests alternative ways of generating, perceiving, and
comprehending thought and sound.
Notes
1 My translation of: “Alors je dirais que le concept philosophique n’est pas
seulement source d’opinion quelconque, il est source de transmission
très particulière, ou entre un concept philosophique, une ligne picturale,
un bloc sonore musical, s’établissent des correspondances, des
correspondances très très curieuses, que à mon avis il ne faut même pas
théoriser, que je préférerais appeler l’affectif en général. . . . Là c’est des
moments privilégiés.” Gilles Deleuze, “Image Mouvement Image Temps.”
Cours Vincennes—St Denis : le plan—02/11/1983. www.webdeleuze.com/
php/texte.php?cle=69&groupe=Image%20Mouvement%20Image%20
Temps&langue=1 (accessed February 10, 2011)
2 See also oreau’s essay “Walking” and his|its concept of “wildness”—
“sound” can be read as “wildness” with regard to “music” (as sound
organized by a traditional composer)—the unformed, unintended,
32677.indb 20 13/10/2016 09:41
Introduction 21
untamed in comparison to John Sullivan Dwight’s canonization in
oreau’s time of European Classical Music (and in particular the
compositions of Beethoven) as the paradigm for a future American
Music.
Works cited
Cox, C. (2003), “How Do You Make Music a Body without Organs? Gilles
Deleuze and Experimental Electronica.” Available online: http://faculty.
hampshire.edu/ccox/Cox-Soundcultures.pdf (accessed September 15,
2015).
Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988), A ousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson
and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.
Jonas, H. (1954) “e Nobility of Sight,” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 14(4) (June): 507–19.
Klein, J. (2010), “What is Artistic Research?” Available online: http://www.
researchcatalogue.net/view/15292/15293 (accessed September 15, 2015).
Murphy, T. S. and Smith, D. W. (2001), “What I Hear is inking Too: Deleuze
and Guattari Go Pop”, ECHO: A Music-Centred Journal, 3 (1). Available
online: http://www.echo.ucla.edu /Volume3-Issue1/smithmurphy/
(accessed June 2, 2015).
Nietzsche, F. (2009), Writings from the Early Notebooks, R. Geuss and
A. Nehamas (eds), trans. L. Löb. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Noë, A. (2009), Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other
Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang.
Rilke, R. M. (2001), “Primal Sound” in D. Rothenberg and M. Ulvaeus (eds),
e Book of Music and Nature. An Anthology of Sounds, Words, oughts.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 21–4.
Rilke, R. M. (2007), Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke. Vol. II: 1912–26, trans.
G. J. Bannard. Leiserson Press.
32677.indb 21 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking22
acker, E. (2011), In e Dust Of is Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. UK:
Zero Books.
oreau, H. D. (1962), e Journal of Henry David oreau, B. Torrey and
F. H. Allen (eds). In fourteen volumes (bound as two). New York: Dover
Publications.
oreau, H. D. (1973), e Illustrated Walden, J. L. Shanley (ed.). Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
oreau, H. D. (1998), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Varèse, E. and C. Wen- chung (1966), “e Liberation of Sound”, Perspectives of
New Music, 5(1) (Autumn—Winter): 11–19.
32677.indb 22 13/10/2016 09:41
Autobiographical sightline: Time- sound-memory
My earliest memory goes back to my second year, to 1962 and a
nineteenth- century town house in Blerick/Venlo, close to the Dutch/
German border. is memory, if it is a real one indeed, is not linked to
some image but to sound: I am a busy toddler, leaning on the edge of
my playpen. I remember this because I heard music on the radio: Maria
Callas, Madame Butterfly (as I would learn years later). is was also the
first time, as I remember now, that I had to cry, moved by the beauty I
heard. Sometime later on (about a year or so, a long time in a child’s
experience), I cherished that memory and whenever I wanted to listen
to the radio I would go and sit in the intimate space of my playpen. e
Top 40 was my favourite show, and for a long time it would really bother
me when some song no longer made it to the list. Trying to cheer me up,
my mother would tell me that there also were evergreens, but that didn’t
convince me, for it meant you had to wait until some deejay would play
your favorite evergreen on the radio, implying you were completely
dependent on his whims.
In the early 1970s my parents became fervent collectors of Alle 13
goed, a series of albums with top favorites, and this allowed me to play
my best loved songs any time ad nauseam. Still, I realized that something
quite different was going on as well. I had become aware of the notion
of fleetingness, transitoriness. ings could simply be over, never to
return again. I would be eagerly looking forward to an anniversary or
2
Time|Place|Memory: Artistic Research
as a Form of inking-rough-Media
Krien Clevis
32677.indb 23 13/10/2016 09:41
Sonic inking24
some outing, but when the day arrived I was also quite sad, because I
realized that soon it would be over again. If time made it possible for
things to take place, because of the passing of time things would also be
gone again in a flash, vanishing into the past. I began to record specific
moments in stories and I started drawing—to capture some of the
moments soon to be lost.
is new awareness in me, fuelled by a single song or sound
fragment, proved defining for the rest of my life and, through its
documentation, also for my artistry. e “Proust phenomenon,” the
power of smells to trigger early memories, is well known of course.1
Although my abovementioned memory was evoked not by a smell
but by a sound, classical music in particular, the effect has basically
been the same.2 In my case it pertained to a feeling of sorrow that
not until much later was I able to link to the notion of the passing
nature of all things. is is important to me because it touches on
what in essence a memory embodies: that which is not there anymore.
I remember, and therefore I am. To me this understanding implies a
desire to organize and cultivate some memory—reconstructing it, as
well as shaping it and showing it. Our autobiographical memory exists
as thoughts, on paper, and in images, and it is invoked by images, smells,
or sounds.
e autobiographical “sightline” emerges here as an all- decisive
factor in the things I created (artistic) and studied (historical). It allowed
me to design a life of my own, whereby the autobiographical realm
functions less as a straightforward “explanatory” factor than as a catalyst
of memory (Kruithof 1995). For example, my photo work Et in Arcadia
Ego is an attempt to map memories (or the realization of things passing)
in a new way (see Figure2.1).
Artistic research: inking- through-making
I grew up with images. My father was an architect, my mother was
multi- creative. As a child I would sit at my father’s drawing table
32677.indb 24 13/10/2016 09:41
Time | Place | Memory 25
and make sketches of the people who were going to live in the
houses he designed. Had I been raised in another family, I might
perhaps have developed other talents. From an early age, I wanted
to become an artist. Although I did not have one particular art
discipline in mind, I was fascinated by images and in particular by
their content, which also determines their form. is is where the
initial starting point can be situated: why do I want to create certain
images, what is it that I want to express, and what does it mean or
represent?
Artistic research is a specific mode of research of and in the domain
of art from the perspective of the arts. is may apply to all arts (fine
art, composing music, performative art). It implies research by artists of
their own work, which is realized in the questions they ask in relation to
particular concerns in (the development of) their work. Unlike in
Figure 2.1 Et in Arcadia Ego (2010–2012). Duratrans Light Box, frame: old
bed shelves, 130 × 160 × 25 cm.
32677.indb 25 13/10/2016 09:41
