Ashgate - Research Companion to Electronic Music (Global Reach)

Tuning and Metagesture After New Natures

Sally Jane Norman

31st October 2015
TUNING AND METAGESTURE AFTER NEW NATURES

INTRODUCTION

1
Tuning is key to musicking. The word 'tune', an unexplained 14th century variant of 'tone'
that from the 15th century designates the state of being in proper pitch, today has multiple
practical and metaphorical meanings. We tune in and out, we tune machines as well as
instruments, and fine-tune to adapt ourselves and our systems. R.Murray Schafer's Tuning of
the World (1977), dealing with 'sounds that matter' (p.12), sets out a framework that widens
musicking to the study of soundscapes, opening up new fields such as ecoacoustics. Richard
Coyne's Tuning of Place (2010) studies the social synchronisation and calibration affects of
pervasive, interconnected media. This chapter is focussed on the tuning demands of our
transformed instrumental practices and technological environments. Radically extended
conceptions of scale and reach require new tunings and metagestures - gestures generated and
2
relayed through digital prosthetics (Bec ). In turn, the evolving dynamics of tuning and
metagesture reshape our creative practices. Beyond pragmatic implementations, tuning and
the yearnings of metagesture are also volitional forces. They drive efforts to explore,
recognise and respect nuances, to savour and value difference as a cultural strength, and to
non-invasively discover new natures. Acts of tuning and metagesture are deeply ethical.

In musicking we strive to tune instruments so that they resonate in certain ways, to accord
sounds with other sounds, with perceived or imagined phenomena, to synchronise with other
agents making or listening to sounds. Tuning engages sensory and cognitive experience at

1
Notes (all urls consulted 25-07-16)

Small's term 'musicking' is used throughout this text to designate the broader processual,
making and listening qualities of our human musical activities.

2
Becs reflexion on gesture and metagesture, developed in collaboration with Vilm Flusser
(1920-1991), runs throughout his publications and artistic and paedagogical initiatives. Our
numerous collaborations include the joint organistion of a debate on 'Metageste et
Machinerie' during the 2006 Avignon Festival, Rencontres de la Maison Jean Vilar.

different scales: today we continue to discern melodic signatures produced dozens of miles
away with alphorns derived from Neolithic trumpets, whilst being able to enjoy globally
3
networked performances (as in Oliveross Deep Listening ), or musicians far from our planet
4
(as in Wally Schirra and Thomas Staffords Jingle Bells rendering from Gemini 6 in 1965 ).
We regularly come across evidence of our ancestors experiments with instruments and
tunings: Aurignacian bird bone and mammoth ivory flutes dating back 43,000 years, found in
the Geissenkloesterle Cave in the German Swabian Jura, have renewed speculations about
prehistoric culture, its objects and the environments in which they were effectively used
(Higham et al, 2012). Forensic work on sounding bodies and resounding spaces shows how
tightly tuning behaviours are caught up in the acoustics of musicking venues - dedicated and
custom built, requisitioned, or improvised. Performative acoustics of the Oracle Room of the
Hypogeum Hal-Saflieni in Malta (3,000-2,500BC), where a voice speaking at a fundamental
of around 110Hz produces resonance said to vibrate other minds, exemplifies this conjoining
of physical and intangible symbolic affordances (the Hypogeum houses remains of over 7000
human bodies) (Debterolis and Bisconti, 2013).

Social instrumentalisation inherent to the design of cultural edifices drives their efficiency as
political tuning systems, European live arts venues offering striking examples. Enthusiasts of
oral expressivity denounced oculocentric trends in late eighteenth century performance
houses: Drury Lane and Covent Garden refurbishments turned these upscaled, profit-seeking
enterprises into 'theatres for spectators rather than playhouses for hearers' (Richard
Cumberland, 1806, cited in Nagler, 1959, p.408). Nineteenth century musicking venues were
characterised by the audience silence that 'reined in the concerts of the bourgeoisie, who

3
Oliveros began her Deep Listening experiments in 1988 with musicians Stuart Dempster
and Panaiotis, and engineer Albert Swanson, in an unused water cylinder (186 foot diameter)
in Port Townsend, Wash, featuring a 45 second reverberation at low frequencies (for an
example, cf. Suiren at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qp2Js_4urQ). Given access
difficulties and the compromised acoustics audience presence would entrain, Jonas Braasch et
al at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute created and implemented a digital model in RPIs
Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in 2012 for Oliveross 80th birthday. Her
'Deep Listening' practices often involve online collaborative improvisation sessions.

4
On December 16th, the astronauts reported sighting an unknown satellite-type object, then
played Jingle Bells on a harmonica and bells they had smuggled on board (now preserved at
the Smithsonian Institute). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqfIEQKnkJU
affirmed thereby their submission to the artificialized spectacle of harmony - master and
5
slave, the rule governing the symbolic game of their domination.' (Attali, 1985, p.47).
Technical and architectural affordances are integral to the development of prosthetics:
together with spectacles and opera glasses, hearing aids and head-mounted displays, they
enable us to weave cognitive, experiential and social links to our environments, constituting
what Robert Innis calls exosomatic organs. This mass of related, often intertwined technical
artefacts that extend, substitute and compensate for natural powers of the human body (e.g.
microscopes, computers, languages, weaving looms, airplanes, institutions) 'have their own
"trajectories" - dynamic logics or vectorial paths - and define and predefine the grounds for
the historical variability of consciousness, and forms of perception and apprehension.' (Innis,
1984, p.68). In their co-evolution with perceptual schemata and motor skills, exosomatic
organ-spaces construct as much as they construe what Innis (like Merleau-Ponty, Polanyi, and
others before him) denotes as the world at the end of the cane: material qualities of the blind
mans cane rigidity, weight, texture - serve as both probe and filter.

Decried by those who see them as dangerously outstripping our biological rhythms,
exosomatic systems are defended by those who insist that we are drawn to defying constraints
- indeed, who see this attraction as a defining characteristic of our species. Yet debate about
our very identity as a species leads to interrogation about what kinds and scales of experience
remain meaningful, as we strive to reach beyond familiar domains. On the one hand,
exosomatic systems allow us to access forms of biological and cosmological existence that
extend our sense of the intelligible universe we are part of and depend on. On the other hand,
if existence 'seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines' warrants our positioning as
posthuman (Hayles, 1999, p.3), this in turn raises questions as to how we might coherently
articulate experience and cognition characteristic of our posthuman standing.

These are questions this chapter attempts to address, drawing on experiments in tuning that
are motivated by or have clear ramifications for musicking and broader artistic practices. It

5
'How many errors would have been avoided in social science over the past two centuries if it
had known how to analyze the relations between spectators and musicians and the social
composition of the concert halls. A precise reflection of the spectators' relation to power
would have been seen immediately.' Attali, 1985, p.118.
looks at relations between our physiological and technical co-evolution, in turn influenced by
the wider social organisations in which it takes place, considering the three kinds of essential
organs implicated in the performing arts - physiological, technical, social - as constitutive of a
general organology (Stiegler, 2012). In this context, tuning to different exosomatic systems
demands different kinds of metagesture, i.e. gesture that is generated, relayed, and amplified
by technological prostheses, encompassing actual and potential behavioural (reflexive),
6
fabricated (artistic), and communicational (semiotic) activity.

The starting point of this text is material: tuning and gesture, resonance and reach, gesture and
metagesture reference physical events. Vibrations of sound waves, like motor forces causing
gesture, involve substantial bodies and dynamics. Even if compositional processes forego
physical sounding objects as in much electronic and digital sound art, musicking nonetheless
requires our engagement as more-or-less consciously entrained and embodied receivers in the
physical world, who can but relate this experience to gestural dynamics or surrogacy
(Smalley, 1986, pp.82-83).

Ars imitatur naturam in sua operatione/ art imitates nature in its workings
7
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae

How we culturally value sound affects the technologies we use to deal with it: clearly
real-world provenance may be considered determinant, or priority may instead be given to
transcendent qualities associated with electronic or digital synthesis and processing. In other
words, sound objects may be valued for their obvious attachment to real sources (Smalleys

6
Borrowed from Bec, these terms roughly map to the three areas Kahn relates to what he
calls the 'variable technology' of communications, namely the experiential (aesthetic/ artistic),
the scientific, and the communicative (Kahn, 2013, p.20).

7
Via Ceylonese philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, Aquinas's nature in its workings -
translated as its manner of operation -, inspired John Cage. For discussion of Cage's Eastern
and Western influences and attributions, see Crook, 2011.
 8
source-bonding ), or for acousmatic values generated by calculated and/ or algorithmic
processes. The obvious shortcoming of oppositional framings like these is that they
undermine crucially mixed approaches, and the complexities of jointly evolving perceptive
and technical apparatus: something apprehended via one conceptual and instrumental
configuration might look totally different through another. Distinct historical and cultural
settings harbour divergencies which are in turn subject to transformations: our understanding
of the rainbow - which for Christian fundamentalists signifies God's post-flood promise to
never again drown the earth - and of related principles of light composition and
decomposition, has been steadily transformed by optical experiments with instruments refined
in the course of many centuries.

The mediaeval theory of art as expounded by Aquinas was a theory of human technology seen
as an extension of nature (Eco, 1988). Arts status as derivative and accidental compared with
the substantiality of ontologically prior natural substances - divine creation preceding human
production - is what endows it with so-called imitative qualities, albeit as a powerful
combinatorial force: 'There is an activity in the soul of man which, by separating and joining,
forms different images of things, even of things not received from the senses.' (Aquinas cited
in Eco, 1988, 172). Eco illustrates this statement by referring to the architect or builder of a
house: he does not extract the idea of a house 'from some internal store or ideas, by means of
divine illumination, or from a hyperuranic source. Instead, his experience enables him to
conceive of the possibility of something not given in nature, but which can be realized
through the use of natural objects and through constructional activities analogous to those of
nature.' (Eco, 1988, 172).

This is more generally the case with all human tool development: constructional activities
analogous to those of nature in its workings frame the nature they explore to produce insights
that prompt the invention of tools to explore freshly disclosed phenomena, and so it goes on
in an endlessly spiralling process. Each probe-filter shapes and differently reveals the material
it investigates, yielding sometimes irreconcileable visions (as in Feynmans double-slit

8
Source bonding is the term I use to encapsulate the natural tendency to relate sounds to
supposed sources and causes, and to relate sounds to each other because they appear to have
shared or associated origins.' Smalley, 1994, p.37.
experiment). Intertwined practices and situations underpinning these visions resist facile,
dualism-prone labeling as natural, cultural, technological, human, non- or post-human -
making nature in its workings particularly hard to define when it comes to arts and
craftsmanship (Aquinass artifex groups poets and painters with utilitarian workers like
blacksmiths and sheepshearers). While artificially or artistically produced forms draw and
depend on pre-existing concrete reality and experience, reality and experience are themselves
transformed by the means we invent to explore and affirm them. Phenomena identified as
workings of nature thus lend themselves to very different readings, thence to different kinds
of artistic synthesis.

Music cannot be boiled down to a well-defined language, nor can it thus be coded merely by
usage. Music is always in the making, always groping its way through some frail and
mysterious passage - and a very strange one it is - between nature and culture. Schaeffer,
1967, p.11

Electronic music offers a rich vantage point for seeing how 'nature in its workings' might be
grasped and artistically modeled by means of our extended exosomatic organs, given the
variation in types of musicking events, and in the kinds of links they assert with their wider
environments (however ephemeral such links may be within an evolving legacy). These
variations underpin cultural visions and practices. For example, while it offers a means of
classification in theory, Schaeffer's quest for a morphological and typological description of
sounds abstracted from their modes and moments of production is thwarted in practice by our
prior awareness of real sounds in changing contexts that play into our hearing, thence into our
descriptive languages. Harvesting 'concrete sound', regardless of its origins, in order to
abstract its potential musical values, appears as a salutary alternative to mid-twentieth century
compositional strategies that noted musical ideas by means of music theory symbols, then
confided their concrete production to familiar instruments. But decades of experimentation,
expectations, and possibilities that have built on openings created by Schaeffer et al confirm
the essentially historical and transient - and all the more impressively radical - nature of this
groping passage between nature and culture.

 9
Franois Bayles pioneering speleolithophonic work exemplifies changes in the status of
sound objects due to evolving exosomatic affordances - in this case, natural found objects that
10
enjoy specific transcontextual mobility. Acousmatic pioneer, Schaeffers collaborator and
successor as Director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales from 1966, Bayle was inspired
by his discovery of the Jeta Cave in Lebanon in 1968. Jeta (ou murmure des eaux) (1970) is
a creation based on recordings - natural water sounds, use of speleothems as lithophones,
casual music-making and ambient noise of local workers, and even sounds from adjoining
plumbing facilities adjudged compositionally valuable - initially made for an electroacoustic
11
piece commissioned to open the cave's upper gallery (inaugurated in January 1969). The
following year, Bayle produced seventeen studies based on dynamic patterns identified in the
original materials (all but two sketches feature sounds recorded in the actual cave), using
acousmatic compositional principles, and the GRM's prototype mixing desk and synthesiser.
Coupignys synthesiser, its twenty generators linked via a pin connector matrix, allowed
modeling of broad sonic envelopes and typo-morphologies requiring the composer's close
listening, in keeping with Schaeffer's insistence on the importance of human perception (cf.
Teruggi, 2007). With Coupigny's system, complex sounds could be readily generated and
controlled globally, as morphological phenomena lending themselves to the Schaefferian
12
'making through listening' approach. Studio 54 allowed a single user to perform tasks which,

9
A
l ithophone (Greek prefix litho- meaning stone, and suffix -phone meaning sound) is a
percussion instrument made of stones. Speleothem music (Greek prefix speleo- meaning
cave) is percussion music obtained by tapping or striking cave formations; a speleolithophone
is a lithophone designed to be played in a cave.

10
'Transcontextuality can be used as a tool to lend old or existing contexts new meanings (...)
the borrowing of materials may come from any genre, and that borrowing may or may not be
reflected in the formal design of the work the foreign materials are inserted into.' Field, 2000,
pp.50-51.

11
For four November evenings in 1969, the Jeta Cave hosted the polyphonic rhythmic
patterns and layered overtones of Stockhausens Stimmung (tuning of the voice Stimme)
[double meaning Stimmung means tuning or voicing], composed in 1968 for six vocalists
and six microphones, for the Collegium Vocale Kln.

12
Schaeffer was wary of abstract, procedurally calculated forms of control that risked
undermining, if not altogether omitting human perception and listening, a force he considered
essential in the creative compositional process. Regarding his mistrust of parametrically
controllable and digital systems, cf. Teruggi (2007) and Battier (2007).

according to conventionally hierarchised (and ardently union-defended) roles, previously

required the separate skills of a composer, desk technician, and studio manager. The new
situation, akin to that of the future garage- or bedroom-based creative industries practitioner
as much as the traditional lone composer, was a revolutionary social aspect of the GRM's
general organology: artist-technicians could explore sounds independently, in freely looped
listening, learning, and shaping activity.

Implementing the Schaefferian making-through-listening approach and acousmatic

morpho-concepts that yoke together gesture/ matter/ instrument, Jeta is the product of
constructional activities that appear to be analogous to those of nature. While recognising that
this work qualified as concrete by virtue of its operating mode and resources, Bayle
adamantly defended his search for abstract sound organisation principles, devoid of causal or
13
narrative frameworks. With hindsight, this comes across forcefully in his notes for Jeta
Retour (1999):

'With this music (from the 1970s) I had my heart set on starting an abstract
method neither causal nor narrative of dealing with sound organisation. In
arranging displays of energies, it seems to me that I gave new prospects to the
idea of development: the acousmatic horizon opened up, onto a music of
harmonized forms and movements. This specific cave therefore became the
symbolic one where, sheltered from chance and time, nature labours to create
innumerable models.'

Sounds from the limestone cave were generated, relayed, and amplified by a range of
technical systems - exosomatic organs - operating at multiple levels. These organs, or
technical extensions of our auditory senses, were operational as the instruments and
microphones which were used to make the initial recordings, as the synthesiser and mixing

13
Bayle thus pursues the philosophy of his predecessor, Schaeffer, who "did not include in his
music any reference to nature, or any recognisable sound these diaboli in musica that
corrupted or dramatised the perception of music", but instead "the use of sounds with no
relation to a specific meaning, that is, listen to it by itself with no external signification that
would pollute the perception." Teruggi, 2007, 214.
desk used to remediate the resultant materials in the GRM facilities, then finally as the
amplifier and speaker systems used to deploy the opus thus composed in the original site and
elsewhere. In terms of institutional implications, in addition to Studio 54's disruption of
professional studio work hierarchies, the Jeta cave events are emblematic of a wider search
for alternative cultural venues that neither overtly impose nor tacitly corroborate conventional
audience hierarchies, as denounced by Attali et al.

Bayle emphasises the fact that technology-enabled changes of scale in the ways we apprehend
nature require profound changes in the language of music, which for him means a new
aesthetic focus on the energetic aspects of sound. The Jeta episode is here related not to
debate real or virtual, concrete or abstract qualities of acousmatics and electroacoustically
processed sounds (questions admirably addressed by Windsor, 2000, and Field, 2000), but
rather to echo Bayle's insistence on the need to invent and invest organologies attuned to our
constantly evolving expressive potential. Stripped of their causal cues (the caves sheer
volume and physical atmosphere, calcite draperies and speleothems, and dripping water, not
forgetting the human and technical agents conducting the actual recordings), the harvested
14
Jeta sounds offered new acousmatic resources. By artfully separating and joining things, we
can synthesise novel images of things that - to paraphrase Aquinas - cannot be directly
received from the senses. Reworked, and despite - or perhaps because of - Bayle's respect for
their provenance, Jeta sounds were resolutely instated as non-figurative entities: 'the murmurs
of waters or of waves, the rhythmical patter of droplets, the thrill of whispers, the "noises", for
all their evocative power, make no attempt to describe. In the words of Magrittes famous
title, this is not a cave!'(Bayle, 1999).

Plasticity of our perceptive apparatus, entrained by use of a growing array of exosomatic

organs, remoulds our conceptual and cognitive frameworks in a recursive process Hayles calls
intermediation to characterise emergent cognition associated with the singular dynamics of
human-computer interaction (Hayles, 2008). This situation inexorably gives rise to creep in
the ways we read reality: as yesterday's discoveries fold into today's humdrum, demarcations

A new version of the first 1970 Jeta series, created in 2012, can be consulted at
14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO3mervXG3A
of natural versus synthetic become slippery - all the more curiously so when new tools reveal
previously unfathomable phenomena which nonetheless seem indisputably and recognisably
natural. To illustrate this historic creep, Brilliant Noise (2006) by tandem Semiconductor
(Ruth Jarman, Joe Gerhardt) is an intriguing comparator for the Jeta cave piece.
Semiconductor accessed hundreds of thousands of computer files collated from ground-based
and satellite solar laboratories and observatories, selecting raw images of previously unseen
15
activity which they reorganised into spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. By
mapping luminescence of dynamic regions in the resultant images to sound derived from solar
natural radio, Semiconductor's work is literally conducted by fluctuations in solar intensity
16
evidenced by the visuals. Bayle's claim that his 1969 Jeta work 'is not a cave' contrasts
amusingly with Semiconductor's assertion almost fifty years later that Brilliant Noise is, quite
17
literally, a 'symphony by the Sun'.

In baldest possible form: the computer began as a tool - an object for the manipulation of
machines, objects, and equations. But bit by bit (byte by byte), computer designers
deconstructed the notion of a tool itself as the computer came to stand not for a tool, but for
nature itself. Galison, 1997, p.777

Mythologies that convey our attempts to relate to an unfathomable universe, and to

meaningfully assimilate barely sensed magnitudes of time and space, have filled collective
imaginations from the earliest times. Superhuman scales projected and processed by
computational means, encompassing and stretching perceptions gleaned by 'natural' organs,
are radically transforming the nature of experience: our new organology allows us to sound

15
ork was made during an Arts Council England International Artists Fellowship at the
The
w
NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California Berkeley. For further information
and an extract from Brilliant Noise, see http://semiconductorfilms.com/art/brilliant-noise/.

16
Brilliant Noise has been presented in configurations including multiscreen and
multi-channel or surround sound audio, DVD, and live remixes by artists seeking their own
readings of this uniquely sourced material.

17
Works produced during Semiconductor's 2015 CERN residency will no doubt add spice to
this debate.
out places we cannot physically penetrate, and map events otherwise out of range to human
bandwidth. Sonification and auralisation are largely driven by utilitarian goals: our ability to
discern complex patterns and syntax in auditory information can facilitate the parsing of big
data, optimising the distribution of cognitive tasks across discrete sensory channels. The
synthesis of complex data can also yield new aesthetic potential: granular synthesis, a
technique based on Dennis Gabor's time-frequency analysis (leading to Gabor atoms and the
Gabor transform), was introduced to music by Iannis Xenakis's fastidious use of tape splicing
and analogue tone generators. First featured in Analogique A-B (1958-59) , where Analogique
B constitutes the granular synthesis response to the initial, stochastically composed orchestral
part A, the technique involves splitting sonic samples (44100 per second at a standard
sampling rate) into 1-50ms grains that are layered and manipulated to constitute audible
1819
events whose sonic qualities cannot be attained by traditional synthesis methods. Barry
Truax's implementation of real-time granular synthesis in interactive compositional
20
environments , and Curtis Roads' invention of the digital granular synthesis engine, boosted
its uptake. Increasingly fine adjustments to independently treat speed, pitch, and formant
characteristics of audio samples now make granular synthesis a core feature of such widely
21
used free software languages as CSound, SuperCollider, Reaktor, Pure Data, ChucK.

Crafting textured, evolving soundscapes by shaping masses of indivisible sonic quanta calls
for tuning and metagesture scoped beyond the reach of familiar activities. Computers
ensuring the corresponding calculations are, in Galison's terms, generators of a new nature, or

18
Roads segments time (past, now, and future) into periods, delay effects, frequencies, and
perception and action, identifying nine time scales: infinite, supra, macro, meso, sound object,
micro, sample, subsample, and infinitesimal, where normal auditory recognition spans the
macro to micro range. (Roads, 2001, pp.1-42).

19
The 1964 GRM Analogique A-B recording is available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXIJO-af_u8

20
Truax's 1986 Riverrun, a powerful instantiation of his real-time synthesis technique, was
recreated as an 8-channel tape version in 2004 (cf. https://www.sfu.ca/~truax/octo.html). A
brief extract can be heard at http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/excerpts/Riverrun.mp3

Affordances include wavelength synthesis where grain length is determined by pitch of

21

contents, Clisson synthesis where grain contents are modified with a glissando, and pulsar
synthesis where each grain is generated by an impulse generator.
at least an unprecedented scale of nature, in that their sampling-based models challenge
22
anthropocentric definitions that have long depended on direct observability. Like the
pseudo-random numbers of Monte Carlo simulations that link fields - mathematics, physics,
chemistry - to found novel representations and implementations (for example those of the
Manhattan Project cf. Galison, 1997), the recombinant possibilities of granular synthesis
demand creative approaches that actively build and extend our organology.

Technical scaling to make legible data that would otherwise outstrip human understanding,
allowing us to generate and sensibly manipulate stochastic masses of data, involves dealings
with consensually recognised 'nature' as much as with our demiurgic projections. In the sonic
realm, such processes have given formidable impetus to initiatives launched and inspired by
Murray Schafer's World Soundscape Project (Schafer, 1977; Wrightson, 1999), reinforced by
concerns for our endangered planetary survival, and calls to re-think the logics and ethics of
the Anthropocene (Zylinksa, 2014). By using extensive statistical analysis to demonstrate the
dynamics of population and landscape ecologies, ecoacoustics shows species spread and
diversity - niche and adaptive behaviours - within predefined temporal and spatial frameworks
(Sueur and Farina, 2015). Discretising and interpreting signals from the environment, such
techniques provide insights that cannot be gained by direct observation, while addressing the
senses with multimodal models of information that are more or less 'earthed' in or abstracted
23
from their subject matter . Primarily designed to inform, such meta-material instantiations
and their conceptual frameworks also inspire new creative approaches (Davis and Turpin,
2015). Like other empirical sciences, ecoacoustics investigates vital materialities by
harnessing probabilist and predictive mathematical models to core subject-matter
considerations, giving rise to a computational gap between reality in the field, and abstraction

22 "
The real question is whether it is legitimate to have an "anthropocentric ontology", that is,
to draw the line between the real and the non-real by what we humans can directly observe.
What makes our scale of observation, in space or time, so privileged? (...) Why should we
study things in real time (...) instead of at longer periods...? DeLanda, 2003.

23
Modeling processes are variously linked to physical objects in terms of their correlations
with empirical facts (tallying of prediction models and experimental findings) and with
fundamental theory (mathematical justification of the validity of assertions). Floating
models are insufficiently attached to either empirical or theoretical premises. Cf. Morgan
and Morrison, 1999.

of the models that address it. Such tensions frequently punctuate human efforts to reconcile
abstract and empirical reckoning: the computation-versus-fieldwork gap encountered in
ecoacoustics might, for example, be whimsically compared with the myth-versus-astronomy
gap that prompted our ancestors' readings of terrestrial animals in the celestial zodiac.

How can one not establish a radical difference between universal Nature and relative
culture? But the very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off.
Cultures - different or universal - do not exist, any more than Nature does. There are only
natures-cultures, and these offer the only possible basis for comparison. Latour, 1993, p.104

Latour thus resumes the paradox whereby our purportedly natural environment is constantly
transformed by exosomatic organs which recursively and simultaneously transform the
objects of their attention. In a world where we are forever renewing our grasp of nature in its
workings, analysis of tuning practices means reflecting on our positions and categorisations,
and on corresponding timescales deemed relevant. The intangible resonances and physical
vestiges of cultural legacies combine to produce discrete, tightly interwoven durational nodes:
like other artistic artefacts, traces of past musicking are treasured for polysemic values that
outstrip obvious meanings and functions. When re-injected into contemporary creation, they
generate new temporal patterns: we 'imagine the flow of time as assuming the shapes of
fibrous bundles, with each fiber corresponding to a need upon a particular theater of action,
and the lengths of the fibers varying', such that cultural bundles 'consist of variegated fibrous
lengths of happening'. (Kubler, 1962, p.111).

Variegated, stranded patterns and 'shapes of time', which Kubler contrasts to the central lens
of sensibility radiating from artists at a given place and time (as per the structural
methodology or Strukturforschung approach), allow multiple temporalities to be deployed
across artistic processes and productions, extending our tuning range and abilities. In contrast
to the vertical transmission of biological evolution, subject to extinction and irrevocability,
cultural evolution features retroactive appearances of outdated or superseded phenomena, and
 24
horizontal coopting of innovations from concurrent branches (Vaccari and Barnet, 2009) .
These resurgences and cooptations are made possible by the anchorage of human culture in or
as storable media. This gives it a resilience denied to its biological/ biodegradable human
makers, and incomparable potential diversity. In recent history, the range of sonic materials
open to musicking has been massively augmented by the development of storable media and
associated processing techniques, exploited through compositional strategies like Schaeffer's
that privilege perceived attributes of sound objects over speculatively organised instrumental
palettes blanched by academic traditions. In parallel, performance and sound art, multimedia
and computational art, and vernacular 'noise' culture have contributed to new aesthetic
sensibilities, enriching the range of sonic materials we tune to and value. Yet the advent of
novel exosomatic organs, and the race to stay perceptively and cognitively abreast of
openings they offer, also raise real quandaries: what are the links between collectively
readable physical signals evidenced by instrumentation, and the percepts they produce in our
minds? How might we relate our analysis of poietic processes (composition or production of
25
sound) with analysis of aesthetic processes (its reception)?

Franois Delalande addressed these questions when trying to devise a new methodological
starting point for analysing electroacoustic music in the late nineties (Delalande, 1998). To
get beyond then mainstream approaches to melodic and rhythmic organisation, he studied
26
listener responses to Pierre Henry's Sommeil , characterising them as taxonomic (distinction
of key morphological units to acquire a synoptic sense of the work), empathic (attention to
individually felt sensations and experience of sound dynamics), and figurativist (interpretation
of the sound work as a narrative), and/ or as mixes of these elements. While they remain
valuable twenty years later, Delalande's categories must now be read against growing
awareness of how much our technical organs are answerable to unruly amalgams of habits,

This passage draws heavily on Vaccari and Barnet's text, while reconfiguring their ideas in
24

very different ways that hopefully read as respectful of, and resonant with, their work.

These terms and modes of differentiation are cited from Delalande, who references Nattiez's
25

distinction between the immanent structure of a musical work, its compositional (poietic)
processes, and its perceptual (esthesic) processes. Delalande, 1998.
26

Sommeil constitutes the first movement (2'52) of Henry's 25-movement Les Variations pour
une porte et un soupir. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLDPcnicyUA
expectations, and aspirations. However compellingly reproducible their findings, their
implementation mobilises tacit, historically layered knowledges that make abstract reasoning
27
and empirical evidence tortuously interdependent . The fact that unfamiliar events disclosed
by tools and technical systems are often staged to take on aesthetic value adds to this
complexity, as does use of tools and systems to elicit new meanings from old materials:
'There is history, there is culture, and there are the artefacts which carry them beyond our
death: technics.' (Vaccari and Barnet, 2009, p.10). Materials and artefacts taken for granted -
or dismissed as obsolete - can resurge as creative means endowed with unique affordances
that mobilise sometimes deeply sedimented and spatially remote cultural experience. For
example, recent grid technology-enabled investigation of complex sounds of certain long lost
instruments has produced inspirational sonic libraries used by contemporary musicians, as
well as historians. Resources thus derived from models of the Ancient Greek epigonion, a
wooden-framed, forty-eight stringed harp, have prompted research into other ancient
instruments including the salpinx, barbiton, aulos, and syrinx, further enriching our
28
twenty-first century organology.

Use of exosomatic organs to source deep and distant real-world phenomena inaccessible to
unaided perception is a hallmark of Alvin Lucier's work, whose serendipitous meeting with
physicist and amateur organist Edmond Dewan created the conceptual and technical
29
conditions for his Music for Solo Performer (1965) . Dewan's system to investigate alpha
brainwaves struck Lucier 'more for theatrical or visionary reasons than for sound or musical
reasons, because I didn't know what it was going to sound like. Actually, it doesn't sound like
anything because it's ten hertz and below audibility; it isn't a sound idea, it's a control or

27

"We prove the value of an empirical law by making it the basis of a line of reasoning. We
legitimate a line of reasoning by making it the basis of an experiment." Gaston Bachelard, La
Philosophie du non, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1940, p.5.

For an account by scientist Domenico Vicinanza, see Stories from the grid, Episode 2: the
28

Epigonion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-AL3Z0GmlM

29
Excerpt available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIPU2ynqy2Y
 30 31
energy idea.' (quoted in Dewar, 2012, pp.2-3). Quasimodo, The Great Lover , conceived in
1970 and inspired by the long-distance sound-sending ability of whales, orchestrates input
sounds relayed by, and actual sounds of, a set of very different kinds of connected spaces:

In large, single places such as prairies, glaciers or ocean basins, use single
systems of great power or several weaker systems in series. Connect small,
separated spaces such as rock formations within faults, detached railroad cars on
sidings, the rooms, foyers, and corridors of houses, schools, or municipal
buildings with relays of systems, adding shorter distances to make longer ones.
(Lucier cited in Kahn, 2013, p.167).

Kahn coins and defines transperception as hearing in a sound the influences of intervening
space traversed by a signal or sound (p.109), where channels of intervening space and time
are not presumed to be evacuated (p.171). He suggests that Lucier allows us 'to create and
understand mixes and mashes that are transperceived environmentally', placing works like
Quasimodo in the context of 'transductive trajectories in the "mixed circuits" in the history of
telecommunications, in earth returns, ionospheric reflections, and elsewhere' (p.169). Such
mixes and mashes have become an integral part of everyday planetary media, often spurred on
by pioneering collaborations between ICT operators and artists. For The Virtual Abbey
(1995), musician-producers Luc Martinez, David Hykes and John Maxwell Hobbes fused
historic and spatial sensibilities by connecting the 12th century Abbaye de Thoronet in Toulon
to The Kitchen in New York, where the Harmonic Choir performed Hykess Earth to the

30
In focussing on Innis's exosomatic rather than what might be called 'endosomatic' organs,
this chapter leaves aside the kinds of tuning achieved by means like Lucier's alphawaves or
Jacob Kirkegaard's use of otoacoustic emissions (Labyrinthitis, 2008). The dividing line
between 'inner' and 'outer' employed here however necessarily remains somewhat arbitrary.

31
Re-created in 2007 by Matt Rogalsky, Laura Cameron et al
(https://mattrogalsky.bandcamp.com/track/quasimodo-the-great-lover-alvin-lucier), and in
2009 by Tintinnabulate, located at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York led by
Pauline Oliveros, and the VistaMuse Ensemble at University of California, San Diego led by
Mark Dresser
(https://www.greenleafmusic.com/telematic-performance-quasimodo-the-great-lover/)
 32, 33
Unknown Power via an ISDN network supplied by Telecom Interactive.
The Cistercian
abbeys acoustics have been prized since its foundation under Folquet de Marseille, its first
abbot elected in 1199, son of a wealthy Genoese merchant and renowned ex troubadour,
composer and singer of secular love songs, who in 1195 left his stellar music career for the
divine voices of monkhood. Some eight hundred years later, Hykes New York choir was
digitally relayed to Thoronet, played live through a sound system that encoded the abbey's
acoustic signature, and transmitted back to The Kitchen thus able to host The Virtual Abbey
performance. Sharing of ambient sound and images from both sites reinforced their respective
audiences' sense of co-location. Hykes and Hobbes dubbed acoustic transportation this
real-time application of acoustic parameters from a distant location to source signals. Through
culturally and affectively potentiated recognition of malleability of materials previously
experienced as unyielding, we readily make these materials part of newly 'naturalised'
substrates of reality.

In the seemingly chaotic 'noise' originating from info streams, nature and the observations of
the universe, certain structures, rhythms, and cycles exist. By processes of filtering,
empha-sizing and amplifying these rhythms of the electromagnetic waves and data structures,
artists and musicians are remodelling the con-texture of acoustic space. Smite, Smits, 2000

Tuning to remote spaces has long inspired creative visions and strategies: moon-bounce or
earth-moon-earth experiments using the moon as a passive communications satellite for
terrestrial signals have been underway since the 1940s. Oliveros's explorations of the
sonosphere - defined as the earth's primary sonic envelope, interwoven with secondary
biospheric and tertiary technospheric layers (Oliveros, 2006, 481) - include over a decade of

Technical and industrial partners included Artists on Line, the Marcel Network led by Don
32

Foresta, and Telecom Interactive. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLW78_lMBiY

The concert was released on CD by Catalyst/BMG.

33
Speleothems were used in a related 1999 initiative: the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU) set up a duplex link between percussionist Alex Grillo who performed on
stalactites in the cave of St Czaire-sur-Siagnes (Alpes-Maritimes), and Martinez who
improvised on stage five hundred kilometers away at ITUs Geneva headquarters.
Echoes from the Moon events launched in 1987 with engineer Scott Gresham-Lancaster and
34 35
ham radio operator and moon-bounce specialist David Oleon. Aelectrosonics (Kahn, 2013 )
and other energetic and electromagnetic arts offer exciting resources to artists seeking new
realms of sonic experience, and - in keeping with the social implications of general
organology - new kinds of cultural gatherings and configurations fittingly and sympathetically
attuned to this experience.

The 2001 Acoustic Space Lab in Irbene, Latvia, was set up to explore the social and creative
potential of sound and acoustic environments, relations between data streams and radio
waves, and collaborative broadcasting and streaming dynamics. Several dozen sound artists,
net and community radio activists gathered in August around Little Star, a 32m diameter
radio telescope sabotaged and abandoned by the Soviet Army when it left the Baltic States,
previously used for monitoring planetary, stellar, and extragalactic radiation, for Very Long
Baseline Interferometry, and for surveillance. The Ventspils International Radio Astronomy
Center (VIRAC) salvaged the radiotelescope, and collaborated with Latvian artists Rasa
36
Smite and Raitis Smits to run the Acoustic Space Lab workshop and symposium. The
so-called acoustic group explored expressive possibilities of the actual dish (a 600 ton mass
with an 800m2 surface), rigging microphones to pick up near environment sounds

After a 1996 performance,audience members at the Moon Festival, California State

34

University at Hayward, queued to hear their voices echo back when talking to the moon.
Oliveross Echoes from the Moon events, including the 1997 Salzburg Festival and 1999 St
Plten Hfefest, have featured moon-processed sound with a range of instruments including a
conch shell, gas pipe whistle, wood block, temple block, and Tibetan cymbals, as well as with
Oliveros's hallmark accordion. For detailed information, see Kahn, 2013.

"I coined the term Aelectrosonic as a way to accommodate the way 'nature' (that is,
35

naturally-generated rather than human-generated electromagnetic activity) was heard as music

or otherwise aesthetically-engaged. (...) it was obvious that aesthetic or musical listening
occurred on the newest media (telegraph and telephone lines), manifesting both mechanical/
acoustical and electromagnetic energies (...). Whereas the mechanical/acoustical
manifestation had a word Aeolian and a varied history, the electromagnetic had neither."
Kahn interviewed by Macauley; Kahn and Macauley (n.d.)

36
Participants and sponsors are listed at http://acoustic.space.re-lab.net/lab/history3.html. As
co-founders of the RIXC Centre for New Media Culture in Riga, and of the Acoustic Space
journal (created in 1998), Smite and Smits have developed interdisciplinary, collaborative
networks for several decades.
(neighbouring forest, bird cries, wind noise, groaning of the telescope's pan-and-tilt
mechanics from its 25m tower). The surveillance group led by Marko Peljhan/ Makrolab
switched the feed horn to 1.5GHz to eavesdrop on INMARSAT communications satellites
serving mobile phone services, ship-to-shore communications, air traffic control signals, and
data packet transmissions. The radio astronomy group focussed on planetary observation,
producing 2D and 3D renderings, line graphs, and control parameters for audio applications.
Participants collectively explored and jammed with their findings during a six-hour webcast
from Riga, organised with partners including Kunstradio in Vienna who thereafter made
available the archives thus constituted on an open source platform. Through their will to
expand and glean artistic materials from beyond the precinct of conventional practices, Smite
and Smits opened up ways to collectively create with transduced Aelectrosonic materials
(Kahn, 2013, p.55). The Acoustic Space Lab's 'self-unconcealment of data' inspiringly reveals
as much as it interprets these unimaginable resources (Whitelaw, 2013, p.226), incentivising
artists in their attempts to tune to unknown energies.

Sputnik's beep, beep pulses as the first artificial satellite were captured, and captured the
imaginations of radio operators all over the world in 1957. Spacecraft velocity and
trackability, and antenna radiation patterns, have been tested in increasingly effective acoustic
and radio-frequency anechoic chambers since our earliest extraterrestrial excursions. In
addition to their being made operable by the usual battery of frequency tuning tests, the
world's two first art satellites, collaboratively developed by Tama Art University and Tokyo
University, feature creative sonic content. Missions of the low-cost 10cm cube nano-satellite
ARTSAT1 INVADER, launched in February 2014, included algorithmic generation and
transmission of synthesised voice, music, and poems. ARTSAT2 DESPATCH (Deep Space
Amateur Troubadour's Challenge) is a 3D-printed space probe launched in February 2014,
whose last signal detected in January 2015 from 4.7M km set the world distance record for
amateur radio. This record is all the more striking given DESPATCH's singular artistic
profile: the probe's sensor readings serve to generate a kind of acoustic poetry structured
37
according to a rhythm-phrase based on Dadaist Hugo Ball's poem Gadji beri bimba.
Converted to current or angular velocity, this rhythm-phrase allows the vessel's trajectory to
be ascertained by cooperative data communication and reconstruction: ground stations

37
Used for Talking Heads' I Zimbra track (Fear of Music, 1979).
receiving fragments of the broadcast poetry share it through the Web and social networks to
38
collectively estimate the probe's position. There is a peculiar poignancy to this use of
staggered, polyrhythmic cues to derive spacecraft coordinates. By thus poeticising the Deep
Space Amateur Troubadour's extraterrestrial dynamics, its artistic and technical makers'
humanising metagesture is powerfully and effectively moving.

Frequencies, rhythms, patterns and cycles thus scaffold parallel explorations of embodied
time and space, and of the computational datasphere where 'digital data is figured (here) as
exactly the thing that it is not: matter', and where the 'sound particle stands for a (problematic)
convergence of data, sound and matter' (Whitelaw, 2003, p.93, 95). These tunings to
purportedly alien phenomena stretch cultural bandwidth and our ability to discern difference
without savagely colonising it, opening up vital senses of possibility.

Artificiality is not a characteristic that denotes the manufactured origin of the object as
opposed to nature's productive spontaneity. Artificiality is something that is within the
artificializing action of man, regardless of whether this action affects a natural object or an
entirely fabricated object. Simondon, 1958, p.71

Cultural positioning embedded in concepts of tuning plays into, and is played out by
exosomatic organs employed in musicking. The heterogenicity of these interfaces is
channeled by biases that underpin their design at pragmatic and conceptual levels, and that
determine their optimal modes of operation. These biases are often attributable to the
standardisation quest that facilitates communication and uptake of techniques but at the same
time limits differences, constraining expressive potential. They may also be attributable to
more or less conscious ideological choices. Modern western concepts of tuning are largely
anchored in nineteenth century scientific decisions favouring often elegant mathematical
models that facilitate the development of holistic systems. Joseph Fourier's concept of
waveform synthesis was applied to sound by Georg Ohm, who claimed that our perceptive

38

For information on ARTSAT1 : http://artsat.jp/en/; ARTSAT2: http://despatch.artsat.jp/en/

apparatus resolves complex tones into simple, sinusoidal components (Rodgers, 2010).
Searching for analogies across vision and audition, and building on what he dubbed 'Ohm's
law', Hermann von Helmholtz posited correspondences between loudness, pitch and timbre,
and brightness, hue, and saturation of colour, arguing that we can only perceive tones that
correspond to sinusoidal vibrations. Helmholtz's tuning fork apparatus demonstrated Ohm's
theory by synthesising complex sounds from sinusoidal components (Rodgers, 2010, p.123).
Deemed compliant with a take on reality affirmed as uncontestably objective, this model
triumphed over August Seebeck's equally legitimate model that addresses features glossed
over by the sine wave. Intrigued by the way we hear as continuous the discrete sonic pulses
produced by a siren, Seebeck showed pitch to be perception based and determined by periodic
phenomena (pulse frequency), rather than by a purported fundamental frequency.

Tara Rodgers' study of the contradictions between Seebeck's empirical findings and Fourier
analysis-based theory adopted by Ohm, discusses this moment as a historical turning point.
Advocating Ohm's definition of tone in terms of its sinusoidal components, rather than its
periodicity as claimed by Seebeck, Helmholtz paved the way for viewing the harmonic
oscillations of continuous tones as more naturally integrated to human perception than the
discontinuous tones exemplified by the discrete impulses of a siren (Rodgers, 2010, p.123).
By equating the sine wave with purity, neutrality, and musical value, in keeping with
neoclassical aesthetics of simplicity and order, conventional acoustics ascribes lesser status to
the physical/ timbral characteristics of sound associated with aperiodic waveforms (Rodgers,
2010, p.126). Sine wave-based definitions of tone moreover foreground diagrammatic modes
of scientific representation, in other words, legibly rationalised information that was and often
still is considered more trustworthy than the supposedly fickle findings of the senses. As
Rodgers notes, historic tendencies to ascribe direct perceptive appeal to sine-based tones,
ruling out the validity of more complex aperiodic conceptualisations, prefigure construals that
today oppose analogue media, seen as closer to 'natural' reality by virtue of their continuous
encoding, and digital media seen as alienated from supposed 'real world' continuity by virtue
of their discretised encoding.

Over-simplification evident in both construals begs the question of whether, and how far, one
can argue for the interdependence of theoretical constructs and of their physical instantiations
or ramifications. Conflicting views like these are at least partially imputable to the ways we
differentially map and value theoretical conjectures and their real-world objects. Suarez
identifies two main approaches in theory-to-world tuning: 1) we approximate theory to the
problem situation by introducing corrections into the theoretical system (qualified as
'construct' idealisation); and 2) we approximate the problem situation to the theory by means
of simplifying the problem situation itself (qualified as 'causal' idealisation) (1999, p.174).
Our concepts of computation testify to these differences, and to our difficulties trying to
reconcile agonistic terms while avoiding simplistic or reductionist holism. At once a
technique of abstraction, using formal logic, mathematics, and manipulations of symbols and
languages to ground its procedures, computation is also a 'technology of material agency'
39
which pragmatically partakes in the world it models and represents (Fazi and Fuller, 2016 ).
Instead of imposing distance, discretisation is consequently viewed as the means to tightly
weave computational processes into the fabric of the world. Sound art, infused with the
legacies of abstract, theoretical logics, and with visceral, temporal resonances that prompt
complex affective responses, is charged with this ambivalence. We attend to sonic events at
multiply layered levels, seeking to (re-)cognise temporal processes we can map to our
rhythmic sensibilities via taxonomic, empathic, figurativist, or other kinds of constructs.

Tuning in involves tuning out - filtering out unwanted frequencies, and signals that would
interfere with operations, distort the final output (the sounds), or produce other 'interference
effects'. But interference banding serves as a metaphor for the rich potential, and
shortcomings, within interoperating models. It also points to the potential for the generation
of unintended social effects and hybrid artifacts. Images and sounds can be combined to
produce not just averages, but new entities. Coyne, 2010, p.35.

Auditory interfaces allowing humans to tune to machine irregularities and interference has
been built into or onto computer circuits to extract hardware and software information since
early mainframe days. Louis D. Wilson recounts computer audio experiments in 1949: static
from background radio kept running during night test shifts on the BINAC revealed patterns

Examples cited by Fazi and Fuller include the algorithmic organisation of commercial
39

warehouses, air traffic, and administrative data, as well as extensive arrays of networked
social practices.
of activity in the computer (Miyazaki, 2012). Wilson installed a detector, amplifier and
speaker to make this more audible, thus useful for monitoring purposes. Machine listening
techniques were developed for the American UNIVAC-1 and TX-0 computers, the Australian
CSIRAC, English Pilot ACE and Pegasus machines, and the Dutch PASCAL (acronym for
40
Philips Akelig Snelle CALculator - 'Philips' horribly fast calculator'). In 1962, electronics
engineer Willem Nijenhuis of Philips Natuurkundig Research Laboratory in Eindhoven
published a 45rpm vinyl recording of computer sound experiments entitled Rekengeluiden
van PASCAL, made by amplifying radiofrequencies generated as the machine ran through
different programmes. The resultant stretches of noise, or variously textured electronic bursts,
resemble the gritty, leaky sonic materials prized by contemporary afficionados of 'noise
music' and analogue synthesisers, predating 'snap, crackle, glitch' aesthetics presciently
identified as post-digital by Kim Cascone (Cascone, 2000).

Recent media archaeology experiments which bridge these generations and communities of
practice confirm how thoroughly such materials have been integrated into wider cultural
contexts. Matt Parker's Imitation Archive (2015), for example, has established a permanent
sonic repository covering 70 years of computing history, and a set of his own compositions
bearing titles like Test Patterns, Wrens, Bombes of Bletchley, Terminal, Transmission from
Overseas. Commissioned by the British Library Sound and Vision Archive, the repository
41
was created during a residency at Bletchley Park's National Museum of Computing. Parker
recorded characteristic sounds of historical machines considered key for computing - and
indeed for world history - including the restored Harwell Dekatron relay-based 'WITCH'
(1951), the Tunny cipher machine, and the recently completed 1943-44 Colossus replica.
Together with the sonic signatures of mainframe computers, the repository features sounds of
the mechanical comptometers and calculators that were integral to their operating
environment (e.g. Facit, Brunsviga, Contex devices). Layered rhythmic patterns and
harmonics punctuated by the whirring and hissing of machine parts that accelerate and

40

The record was enclosed with issue n4/5 of the Philips Technical Review, devoted to
scientific and musical discussion of the algorithmic materials. See Fritz, 2011. Tracks made
available online by Kees Tazemaar at http://www.keestazelaar.com/philips.html

41
Further information and extracts: http://www.earthkeptwarm.com/the-imitation-archive/
decelerate are compiled in Parkers sophisticated, technoromantic compositions. These
contrast with the more rawly literal machine listening legacies of artists like Jonathan Reus,
whose iMac Music media archaeological performance explores digital software routines and
42
the hardware housing them. Running iMac G3 circuitry is surgically live-hacked by
performers whose fine-tipped sound amplifying probes generate acoustic 'signatures' of the
ongoing processes, while messing with desktop screen displays. As malfunctions multiply,
distortion levels rise until the system's memory, corrupted beyond recognition, fatally crashes
this sonic and machinic theatre of anatomy.

Electronic machines and synthesisers have been used in music for over a century: Meissner's
1936 electronic music history publication already evokes a forty year incubation (Rodgers,
2010, p.9). Given the enrichment of compositional material by various kinds of
electromagnetic fluctuations, much creative investigation in recent decades has focussed on
the edge of analogue and digital systems, if not on the wilful blurring of that edge. For
example, live coding's embodied, audiovisual displays of real-time algorithmic processing
imbue what is initially and essentially a computational practice, with the gestural immediacy
of performance. We tune to diverse kinds of signals, and to the micro- and
macro-temporalities emanating from the digital computation processes and from the coder's
physical interventions, to enjoy the vitality of this 'differential distribution of intensities'
(Murphie, 2013, non paginated).

Antidatamining works by the French RYBN artists' collective exploit what they call real-time
archaeology of data flows. RYBN mines web-extracted data to foreground significant
moments of socio-economic and geopolitical imbalance exacerbated by the proliferation and
impenetrability of digital data. For Antidatamining VII - Flashcrash, commissioned for the
Raisons d'agir festival at Espace Mends France, Poitiers, in April 2011, Kevin Bartoli,
Marika Dermineur, and Julie Morel based their sound performance/ installation on the trillion
dollar stock market crash of May 6th 2010, where massive plunges in key stock values
triggered general financial chaos and breakdown. RYBN acquired publicly available data

Further information and extracts:

42

http://www.jonathanreus.com/index.php/project/imac-music/
from whole market data company Nanex, a fierce critic of high frequency trading (HFT) like
that behind the notorious Flash Crash, and scraped further material from Yahoo!Finance via
IP proxies. Installed in the Poitiers planetarium, RYBN's Flashcrash used a 9.1 surround
sound speaker system where the audio channels relayed data streams corresponding to eight
43
markets peripheral to the central New York Stock Exchange. The work featured high
frequency bursts and pulses, bass rumblings, and propagation of resonance effects to heighten
intensity:

'the whole signal remains fabricated, and is based on very complex phenomena of
feedback interactions... Financial noise is created by the sum of all its internal
feedbacks, anticipation process(es), and mimetic forces. The noise we can
produce in the framework of antidatamining, is based on the matter we explore.
HFT provides a wide range of frequencies, infinite structural composition sets,
44
and a strong symbolic and metaphoric matter.

Rekengeluiden, iMac Music, I mitation Archive, and Flashcrash foreground what Whitelaw
defines as transmateriality: 'a view of media and computation as always and everywhere
material but constantly propagating or transducing patterns through specific instantiations.'
(2013, p.223). To return to Smalley's terms, sonic materials here are source-bonded: they
meet expectations regarding their relations to supposed causes, and discernibly voice their
interrelations within a realm of operationally tuned human-computer inter-mediation. Theirs
is a new kind of performativity, a machinic orality or machinic processuality akin to that
described by Guattari, its 'flight into machinations and deterritorialised machinic paths
capable of engendering mutant subjectivities' (1995, p.90).

TO CONCLUDE

Information sourced at http://emf.fr/6567/upgrade/, and provided by Patrick Trguer,

43

director of Lieu Multiples Poitiers, which organised and hosted this event.

44
RYBN, quote from an interview published by Knouf, 2013, pp.149-150.
the 'post-digital' approach to creating music has changed into a digital deconstruction of
audio by manipulating the prima materia itself: bits... this bit-space (sans sound-objects)
contains background information as most spaces do... we have only recently begun to
consider the gauzy veil of hums, clicks, whirs and crackling as worthy of our attention...
data-mining the noise-floor is today's alchemical pursuit of turning bits into atmospheres
Cascone, 1999

Developing affordances to cope with increasingly technologised nature-culture is essential for

45
our evolution as creative extremophiles or savanturiers (adventurers of knowledge) , driven
to constantly extend our exosomatic organ-spaces. Tuning works at least two ways: by
opening up to the discrepant, the superfluous, and the deviant (Coyne, 2010, p.46), it extends
our experiential and cognitive bandwidth. Normative or monopolistic tuning, in contrast,
flattens and inhibits horizons of possibility. Art, geared towards promoting imaginative
diversity and honing our capacity for discernment, yet beholden to the communities it seeks to
address, is acutely prey to this tension. But this is ultimately a fundamentally ethical issue, to
do with willingness to tune to difference, to multiplicity, to unfamiliar dynamics and entities.
Only by positioning ourselves as genuinely open to aesthetic experience, relinquishing
conventional expectations, expedient interpretations, and formulaic reductions, can we hope
to freely explore the nexus of potentially meaningful relations offered by a work of art, and
enhance our ability to entertain otherness.

This chapter ends by reformulating the questions it began with. Can musicking help us
meaningfully integrate the hybrid, multispecies communications opened up by our new
affordances, their unforeseeable coincidences and connections, their posthuman rhythms and
scales? Might our new organs and metagestures allow us to draw on resources from the
biosphere, the cosmos, and the acoustic habitats of our expanding datascapes, in order to build
compellingly post- or superhuman visions comparable to those of ancient creation myths?

45
Creative extremophiles and savanturiers are Bec's terms, the latter being ambiguous in
that savoir (knowledge) and saveur (taste) derive from the same Latin root sapere.

Acknowledgements

Sussex Humanities Lab colleagues, particularly Liam Berriman, David Berry, Alice Eldridge,
Beatrice Fazi, and Chris Kiefer, have been generous and stimulating discussants for ideas
raised here. Kim Cascone forwarded a welcome offline residue of his Residualism manifesto.

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