The ontology of musical objects in contemporary instrumental composition

<p>The musical object occupies a strange place in music criticism. The new musicology schools influenced by post-structuralist continental thought have shied away from the object’s autonomous existence, exemplified by Christopher Small’s view of music as a cultural activity: “musicking.” Other theorists, such as Dennis Smalley, have created taxonomies of musical sound. Smalley’s spectromorphology defines sonic typologies that he claims to be based on an experiential understanding of sound, while simultaneously undertaking the technical project of a systematic cataloguing of sounds. Both views inhabit quite opposite positions in relation to the sound object – either a total rejection of its reality or a positivistic attempt at a catalogue of sound types. Both of these approaches suffer from distancing the sonic object through their respective discourse: by reducing the importance of the object for the sake of viewing music as a network of cultural relations, or by reducing it to an idealized and rationalized object, seeing it as just the product of a bundle of auditory qualities unified by perception. These views introduce a distance from auditory experience, which is at its core an object-oriented experience. In other words, neither meets the musical object on its own level, and because of this, they deny or caricature the musical object’s ontology. Graham Harman’s philosophical study of Object-oriented Ontology is a radicalization of Heideggerian phenomenology. Through a new reading of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, Harman argues that objects – whether real, living, non-living, ideal or abstract – are the primary location of ontological investigation, and that objects exist both discretely and as a part of a wider network of possible relationships. By viewing the object this way, and by recognizing the multifaceted and multidimensional features of the musical object, we may be able to account for features of music that the trends above are unable to recognize or assess, such as the twentieth century aesthetic practices of György Ligeti, Salvatore Sciarrino, and the Spectral school of composition. It is possible to read these composer’s aesthetics as object-oriented because they are so strongly focused on examining sonic objects themselves –whether it is a physical event or modeling a natural process – instead of examining objects only through their affective potential towards human beings. This practice suggests that these qualities and processes are themselves areas for possible contemplation. Historically, this move away from an emphasis on the human-world binary goes against the nineteenth century aesthetic of Romanticism, which relies on an object’s affective potential. Also, an object-oriented position rejects formalism, because of its reduction of music to an intellectual activity. An object-oriented approach to music traverses the line between these two positions, acknowledging the subtle and shifting relationships between the affective and the analytic or, to locate this within Harman’s approach, between the sensual and real. The thesis will explore the implications of an object oriented approach to music, trace the history of its development in relation to music – chiefly that of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – as well as make object oriented analyses of selected works, including my own compositions.</p>

The ontology of musical objects in contemporary instrumental composition

<p>The musical object occupies a strange place in music criticism. The new musicology schools influenced by post-structuralist continental thought have shied away from the object’s autonomous existence, exemplified by Christopher Small’s view of music as a cultural activity: “musicking.” Other theorists, such as Dennis Smalley, have created taxonomies of musical sound. Smalley’s spectromorphology defines sonic typologies that he claims to be based on an experiential understanding of sound, while simultaneously undertaking the technical project of a systematic cataloguing of sounds. Both views inhabit quite opposite positions in relation to the sound object – either a total rejection of its reality or a positivistic attempt at a catalogue of sound types. Both of these approaches suffer from distancing the sonic object through their respective discourse: by reducing the importance of the object for the sake of viewing music as a network of cultural relations, or by reducing it to an idealized and rationalized object, seeing it as just the product of a bundle of auditory qualities unified by perception. These views introduce a distance from auditory experience, which is at its core an object-oriented experience. In other words, neither meets the musical object on its own level, and because of this, they deny or caricature the musical object’s ontology. Graham Harman’s philosophical study of Object-oriented Ontology is a radicalization of Heideggerian phenomenology. Through a new reading of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, Harman argues that objects – whether real, living, non-living, ideal or abstract – are the primary location of ontological investigation, and that objects exist both discretely and as a part of a wider network of possible relationships. By viewing the object this way, and by recognizing the multifaceted and multidimensional features of the musical object, we may be able to account for features of music that the trends above are unable to recognize or assess, such as the twentieth century aesthetic practices of György Ligeti, Salvatore Sciarrino, and the Spectral school of composition. It is possible to read these composer’s aesthetics as object-oriented because they are so strongly focused on examining sonic objects themselves –whether it is a physical event or modeling a natural process – instead of examining objects only through their affective potential towards human beings. This practice suggests that these qualities and processes are themselves areas for possible contemplation. Historically, this move away from an emphasis on the human-world binary goes against the nineteenth century aesthetic of Romanticism, which relies on an object’s affective potential. Also, an object-oriented position rejects formalism, because of its reduction of music to an intellectual activity. An object-oriented approach to music traverses the line between these two positions, acknowledging the subtle and shifting relationships between the affective and the analytic or, to locate this within Harman’s approach, between the sensual and real. The thesis will explore the implications of an object oriented approach to music, trace the history of its development in relation to music – chiefly that of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – as well as make object oriented analyses of selected works, including my own compositions.</p>

The Loudspeaker: Transformative and Tactile Aspects of the Object

<p>Traditionally the loudspeaker has been viewed as a functional object. Whilst also serving as a design artifact and object of consumer fetishism, it is subject to the overriding purpose of the reproduction and replication of sound material. However, within sound-based arts, other understandings and uses of the loudspeaker are emerging. This object is now being recognised for its ability to transform sound, taking a proactive stance within sound-based arts. Through exploration of the psychoacoustic effects of the object, the loudspeaker’s ability to transform the musical object is being recognised. At the opposing pole, through physical interaction and exploiting physical aspects of the object, the loudspeaker becomes instrumental in creating its own musical objects. My research delves into examples of sound and sonic art where the loudspeaker is exploited for its aural, physical and visual characteristics; where specific qualities of loudspeakers, as well as various transformations of the loudspeaker’s physical construction and function, are integral to a particular work. Whilst examining sound installation, sculpture and performance, I will also be unpacking the loudspeaker as an object that permeates everyday life, not least within a consumerist context, and how we have come to understand and listen to loudspeakers, looking at the effects this may have on our perception of sound and listening more generally.</p>

The Loudspeaker: Transformative and Tactile Aspects of the Object

<p>Traditionally the loudspeaker has been viewed as a functional object. Whilst also serving as a design artifact and object of consumer fetishism, it is subject to the overriding purpose of the reproduction and replication of sound material. However, within sound-based arts, other understandings and uses of the loudspeaker are emerging. This object is now being recognised for its ability to transform sound, taking a proactive stance within sound-based arts. Through exploration of the psychoacoustic effects of the object, the loudspeaker’s ability to transform the musical object is being recognised. At the opposing pole, through physical interaction and exploiting physical aspects of the object, the loudspeaker becomes instrumental in creating its own musical objects. My research delves into examples of sound and sonic art where the loudspeaker is exploited for its aural, physical and visual characteristics; where specific qualities of loudspeakers, as well as various transformations of the loudspeaker’s physical construction and function, are integral to a particular work. Whilst examining sound installation, sculpture and performance, I will also be unpacking the loudspeaker as an object that permeates everyday life, not least within a consumerist context, and how we have come to understand and listen to loudspeakers, looking at the effects this may have on our perception of sound and listening more generally.</p>

Shadows of Black and White

This chapter considers the role of seen and unseen infrastructures in the material transmission and circulation of May Irwin’s (1862–1938) famous “Frog Song.” Just as ontologies of music shift in our digital era, the chapter peels back the hazy ontological histories of this song—as material commodity, technology, and memory—to consider its ramifications as a musical object replete with racial and social meanings. The argument developed here brings together aspects of the “hard” infrastructures of song sheet publishing, paper, and lithography, on the one hand, and the “soft” infrastructures of race, body, and memory, on the other. More specifically, the material resources of the song’s production—in printed page, body, and recorded sound—illuminate the shadowy histories of this song and emphasize how these materials reconfigure shifting notions of gender and race across cultural and historical boundaries into the twenty-first century.

Locality, Distance, and Troubadour Song in the Second Crusade

Troubadour song has been explored as an expression of courtly love and early vernacular song creation, even mythologized as a brief flowering of a romanticized Occitanian golden age. However, troubadour songs also importantly act as expressions of place and provide indices of contemporaneous regional communities and identities. Contemporary with the Second Crusade, the troubadour songs Pax in nomine Domini by Marcabru and Lanqan li jorn by Jaufre Rudel employ circularity, dialectic, and movement as ways of expressing place and creating a sense of near versus far. These songs should not be understood as only fixed texts; rather in sounding, transmission, and the enacting of motion they move through new environments and assume new agency as they travel. Troubadour songs of the Second Crusade thus transcend the role of fixed musical object to mediate between the position of composer-poet, the voice of the performer, and the reception of distant listeners.

Music, Mousike, Muses (and Sirens)

The first chapter opens with a famous excerpt from Sartre’s La Nausée where the musical ‘object’ is positioned as resolutely independent of the material props upon which the reproduction of its sounding depends (the gramophone/record), whilst also mapping specific identities (the Jew and the Negress) and their attendant sufferings onto nothing more than its sounding. Thus Sartre, via Roquentin, highlights the way music seems to be both material and immaterial, mediated and autonomous, real and ideal, and deeply and viscerally human but also beguilingly transcendental. It develops this issues that arise from this well-known passage to sketch out some of the key issues in any thinking about music, introducing crucial tropes and associations as well as drawing on the musicological literature that has sought to deconstruct in critical and political ways what it is we mean (or often do not mean) when we think or speak about ‘music.’ Key considerations include music’s essence, definition and location, as well as its emotional and psychological impact (its effect and affective capacity more broadly), its similarities and differences with language, and the roles of composers, performers, listeners and, of course, technology, alongside music’s relationship to identity, society, culture and politics.

Automatic Staff Reconstruction within SIMSSA Project

The automatic analysis of scores has been a research topic of interest for the last few decades and still is since music databases that include musical scores are currently being created to make musical content available to the public, including scores of ancient music. For the correct analysis of music elements and their interpretation, the identification of staff lines is of key importance. In this paper, a scheme to post-process the output of a previous musical object identification system is described. This system allows the reconstruction by means of detection, tracking and interpolation of the staff lines of ancient scores from the digital Salzinnes Database. The scheme developed shows a remarkable performance on the specific task it was created for.

Black Box Music Simona Steena- Andersena – warstwa wizualna jako czynnik determinujący dźwięk. Eksploracja możliwości rozwojowych

Black Box Music by Simon Steen-Andersen: a Visual Layer as a Sound-Determining Factor. An Exploration of Possibilities for Development The article attempts to summarise the work of Simon Steen-Andersen in order to date and describe his work titled Black Box Music in the context of fusing visual and musical experiences. It has been examined how modern technology influences the composer’s creative process. His achievements and understanding of audiovisuality and musical object with the assumptions of Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of acusmatic listening have also been compared.