Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience

by Aden Evens

As people from record collectors to file swappers know, the experience of music - making it, marketing it, listening to it - relies heavily on technology. From the viola that amplifies the vibrations of a string to the CD player that turns digital bits into varying voltage, music and technology are deeply intertwined. What was gained - or lost - when compact discs replaced vinyl as the mass-market medium? What unique creative input does the musician bring to the music, and what contribution is made by the instrument? Do digital synthesizers offer unlimited range of sonic potential, or do their push-button interfaces and acoustical models lead to cookie-cutter productions? Through this interrogation of sound and technology, Aden Evens provides an acute consideration of how music becomes sensible, advancing original variations on the themes of creativity and habit, analog and digital technologies, and improvisation and repetition. Evens elegantly and forcefully dissects the paradoxes of digital culture and reveals how technology has profound implications for the phenomenology of art. Sound Ideas reinvents the philosophy of music in a way that encompasses traditional aspects of musicology, avant-garde explorations of music's relation to noise and silence, and the consequences of digitization.

Genres: Music

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there ever was a book to demonstrate the reach and agility of philosophical thought, this is it. Although concerned primarily with the experience of sound - its sensuality, its production, and its digitisation - not simply a theory ‘of’ sound is offered here, but also a recognition of the powers of sound to inform our philosophies to begin with. Indeed, quite apart from the brilliance of insight scattered throughout the book, the first lesson of Sound Ideas is a renewed respect for aurality in general: more than just a sensory ambience among which we dwell, sound carries within it potent resources for thinking through questions of identity, time and technology, fields too often given over to the primacy of the visual, and - increasingly - the tactile. Attending then, to the specificity of sound - from the technical to the phenomenological - Sound Ideas is first and foremost an organon of sensual appreciation.

Central, however, to Evens' reappraisal of sound is its encounter with the digital: what happens to sound when it is subject to the digital, when the actuality of sound is re-coded into bits and bytes for the sake of 'mechanical reproduction’? Although never falling prey to any kind of technophobia (the opposite in fact, given the obvious respect and learning that Evens has of digital technology), a great deal of the book is given over to cautioning against any uncritical evaluation or celebration of the digital revolution. Indeed, it’s precisely the close and detailed attention given to the specificities of the digital that allows Evens so vividly seize upon the singularity of sound itself. On the one hand then, does Evens delve down into the specialised world of audio engineering to demonstrate its powers and technical capacities, while on the other, drawing attention to the vital force of sound that continually exceeds and overflows the co-optive techniques of digitisation.

In its approach to sound from 'both sides’ as it were, Sound Ideas manages all the better to hone in on what it is that makes sound exactly the kind of thing it is. Thus, coupled with discussions of the Fourier transform, granular syntheses, and cellular automata, are equally studied analyses of the compositional principles of musicians like Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Steve Reich, all of which nestle comfortably together in this wonderful book. This ability to so deftly weave together the many differing strands of aurality is no better displayed than in Evens’ rich and rewarding reading of different philosophical ideas in terms of sound: from his magisterial reworking of the Deleuzian concepts of implication and explication, to his retelling of Heidegger’s existential project as an analogue of process of improvisation, Sound Ideas is a book in which both philosophy and sound demonstrate just how much they have to offer each other.

A closing note on the role of Deleuze in this book: although acknowledged variously by Evens, Sound Ideas is a work thoroughly saturated with the influence of Deleuze. From the very name of the book itself (inspired by Deleuze’s ‘doctrine of the faculties’, itself reworked from Kant), to its general approach, this book has thought me not only about the resonance of sound, but about Deleuzian philosophy in general. While there’s no shortage of monographs on or about Deleuze, one could unhesitatingly recommended this one as an exemplar of just what it would mean to extend and ‘repeat’ the Deleuzian project in a totally different and utterly original key. While this shouldn’t at all be the takeaway of this review - or even this book - (Evens understandably does not offer it up as just another in a long line of Deleuzian scholarship), as a Deleuze groupie myself, well, I loved it.

[Joshua Cookson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plenty of excellent information within! Don't love some of the formatting/layout choices, but a very well filled text.