What do you see in this picture?, 

line, dot, form, space, movement or meaning?->

„I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 m.p.h. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sound effects, but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of "sound effects" recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of anyone's imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.

TO MAKE MUSIC

If this word, music, is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.“

(„The Future of Music – Credo“ von  John Cage, 1937)

From John Cage: Documentary Monographs in Modern Art, edited by Richard Kostelanetz. Praeger Publishers, 1970. Scanned and re-formatted by Eluna.) 

Aesthetic value is the value that an object, event or state of affairs (most paradigmatically an art work or the natural environment) possesses in virtue of its capacity to elicit pleasure (positive value) or displeasure (negative value) when appreciated or experienced aesthetically.

(Levno Plato and Aaron Meskin Unedited draft of entry on Aesthetic Value forthcoming in Encylopedia of Quality of Life Research (Springer 2013)

This video is a part of my audiovisual sketch for the performance in the installation „still/silent“. The sound is fragmentary experiences and memories from my childhood in the city of Hiroshima in the 60s. In doing so, I explored the subject of auditive momory.

Audio was not synchornised with visual, but both materials are in the context of "still/silent" together, I think that it is the fragments of 'memory'.

This sound compostion is without algorithmic procedure.

„Possibility of experimentation in/between electro-acoustic music and other arts, after the digital revolution", 

EMS18 (Electroacoustic Music Studies Network) - 14th Conference, Electroacoustic Music: Is it Still a Form of Experimental Music?, Villa Finaly, Florence, Italy, 20 – 23 June

Erika Matsunami

Abstract

This paper is a contemplation about the contemporary aesthetics in/between auditory and visual experiences, and about the possibility of experimentation in/between experimental music and other arts, after the digital revolution.

At the beginning as background the “perception” of human ability and the medium "digital" are considered, and in the process the medium “digital” is compared with the analogue medium as well as the magnetic tape from the point of view of aesthetics. For this, three artistic projects are considered. The first is Symphonie pour un homme seul (Symphony for a Man Alone) , an early masterpiece of musique concrète  by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, which was composed in 1950, and as a ballet version, choreography by Maurice Béjart, that was first performed in 1955 at the Théâtre de l'Etoile in Paris.

The second is the sound installation Rotations 2  (2016) by Max Eastley, a visual and sound artist, which was represented in the exhibition of two British sound artists (with Martin Riches) “Two Measures of Time” at the Stadtgalerie in Saarbrücken, September 2016 – January 2017. The third is the piece of music Constellations for Koto and electronic sounds  composed by Marc Battier, a composer and musicologist, that was played with a koto (a traditional Japanese stringed instrument) by Naoko Kikuchi and electroacoustic sounds at the “Nacht Klang” concert at St. Elisabeth Church in Berlin, August 2012. 

   Simultaneously, materiality and performativity are reviewed with regard to experimental music and visual arts.

A CONTEMPLATION OF THE CONTEMPORARY AESTHETICS IN/BETWEEN AUDITORY (INVISIBLE) AND VISUAL (VISIBLE) EXPERIENCES

Visual information processing is the ability to interpret what “I” see (interpretation), namely a vision to direct the action, such as the effect that is the experience of emotion or feeling. In this experience we have another ability, namely auditory perception. Hearing (audition) is the ability to perceive sound by detecting vibrations. Hearing a sound (in the auditory system) draws the attention to something, evokes emotion. The auditory information will be memorized, recognized, and so on, as is also the case in the two distinct visual systems. The sense of sight (vision) and hearing (audition) belong to the five traditionally recognized senses, the other three being taste (gustation), smell (olfaction), and touch (somatosensation); they are a multitude of senses.¹ 

   The metacognitive ability is the awareness and understanding of one’s thinking and cognitive processes; thinking about thinking. Metacognition refers to the knowledge in the cognitive processes, in other words the capacity to reflect on our thoughts and behaviors. The perceptional abilities depend on the personal level of perceptual experience. We can reflect those perceptual experiences of the self. This self-reflection is described in the Cambridge dictionary as follows: “The activity of thinking about your own feelings and behaviour, and the reasons that may lie behind them.” The high level of human self-reflection is related to or referred to as the philosophy of consciousness, the topic of awareness, and the philosophy of mind.

- THE MEDIUM “DIGITAL” COMPARED WITH THE ANALOGUE MEDIUM AS WELL AS THE MAGNETIC TAPE FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF AESTHETICS

Magnetic recording systems have been in existence since 1898, when the Danish scientist Valdemar Poulsen invented what he called a telegraphone, where a magnetic recording is made on thin steel wire. After the end of the Second World War, the rapid advances in technology as a result of the war, an upsurge of interest from many quarters in new sound techniques, and a generally expansionist economic climate provided sufficient incentives for institutions to provide support.² Schaeffer has started to experiment in his compositions that he has served the sound as auditive material, and therefore he developed the technique and the method of montage with everyday natural sounds recorded on tape (Schaeffer termed these everyday natural sounds “sound fragments”³ and they were engraved into a spiral groove which was transformed into an auditory and time-based medium) and the recorded sound also included historically and representable archived sounds (fragment of history). For this he developed a unique concept through his research – acousmatic music, which aimed for the auditive rendition in the performative representation. 

   "Acousmatic listening" was indicated by musique concrète composers as listening without seeing – without knowing (to require auditory attention and perception rather than recognition of seeing), and Schaeffer termed the process “reduced listening”. Hamilton claims, “Strictly, reduced listening should not be equated with listening without seeing; rather, it is listening that is enhanced by listening without seeing. The object of acousmatic or reduced listening is what Schaeffer calls a sound-object (objet sonore), apparently discounting the commonsense assumption that sounds are temporal processes rather than things.”⁴

(...)

"The dematerialized images of film are the raw contents of sensation, without the forms, horizons, and contexts that usually orient them. And this is how film crosses the threshold of a new kind of perception, one that is below or above the human. This new perception is multiple and anarchic, nonintentional and asubjective; it is no longer subordinated to the requirements of representation and idealization, recognition and designation.⁶⁰ What I argue through Nancy and Denis is that this model of perception need not be situated at a pre-personal level. In other words, we do not necessarily need to move beyond the human to shift our understanding of perception to that which is always mediated, is often non-intentional, asubjective and multiple. In this vein, in critiquing the subject that classical film theory constructs as its viewer, Shaviro assumes that subject and then dismisses it as ‘human’, and in need of displacement. Therefore, in his account, we need to move above or below the human level to cross to a new form of perception. In this way he leaves the subject of classical theory intact and moves elsewhere for an account of film perception. Rather than completely shifting away from the human, however, I argue that the human is not limited to the ‘subject’ that film addresses, nor does classical film exhaust the reality of human perception or definitively account for what is ‘natural’. The concept of the human is contingent, mutable and flexible. It can stretch to encompass changing notions of modes of perception, new ways of understanding the body, and challenges to false dichotomies such as natural/technical or human/animal. Neither above nor below the human, we need to think the human itself as not subordinated to the requirements of representation. Furthermore, we do not have to escape the category of the human to get a perception that is always already becoming-other, technological, often non-intentional, and without guiding consciousness.⁶¹

   Like Deleuzian models, I argue for a way of thinking about film using concepts that focus not on cognition and referential meaning, but instead on forces and material encounters. In contrast to a Deleuzian approach, however, I think through these encounters in terms of subjects. But in my reading the subject is constituted inter-relationally or in alterity. This understanding works to dismantle oppressive formulations of the subject that have been historically dominant in Western thought. The subject is not thought of as autonomous, discrete or as having mastery over her environment. She is not easily able to separate self and other or to categorise others on the bases of various adjectives. This de-subjectified subject makes it difficult to operate in ways that are dominating or that reduce others to a known quantity. In contrast to Deleuzian antihumanism, I formulate here an ethics that uses humans, but humans refigured or thought otherwise. Operating from the standpoint of ethics and wanting to hold on to a notion of responsibility, the particular perspective I am moving towards here maintains a notion of a subject, however interrupted.

   Paradoxically, models of ethics that try to completely move away from the subject often in fact become solipsistic – and the web of relations in which we are enmeshed and act recede from view. Here I refer specifically to Deleuzian formulations and their roots in Spinoza and Nietzsche. From Spinoza the emphasis on positive affects as a basis for forming adequate thoughts from which to act in the world, while inspiring, requires a great deal of elaboration to convincingly argue that it can address the ways in which our responsibilities and relatedness may often diminish our powers to act or undo us in necessarily painful ways. The Nietzschean emphasis on an active forgetting of the past and a willing singular affirmation in the present, while it absolves us of our guilty consciences in ways that can be affectively liberating, may let too many off the hook in terms of our ethical accountability and responsibility. I worry that it may absolve precisely those who have played the greatest role in past atrocities that have diminished and continue to diminish the power of particular peoples. A considerable amount of work must be done to make a convincing argument that Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics can encompass a notion of responsibility, although their focus on desiring productivity and lines of flight provides needed resources for thinking about resistance to the dogmas of late capitalism. Tamsin Lorraine attempts such a reworking through her argument that Deleuzian assemblages can be read as larger groups or communities, extending their framework beyond the individual-as-assemblage, to which it falls prey conceptually.⁶² Lorraine further reasons that by limiting others’ lines of flight, I limit my own, therefore my power to act is dependent on the ability of all to act. While these modifications help to broaden a Deleuzian ethics and give shape to a related world of beings, for the purposes of my project here, Nancy and Levinas offer a framework that I find more productive. Whatever the category of the human may mean, there is a way in which the life form that has been given that title is uniquely responsible to and for the world. By world, I mean to other beings, including animals, to their histories and to the environment. It is the case that ‘humans’ seems to be particularly adept at damaging the environment, animals and each other. This is the category of life, however historically contingent, that I mean to address as potential spectators. Although a traditional notion of subjectivity is undone by both Levinas and Nancy, there is still a subject, just one that is dependent on, vulnerable to and constituted with others. There is also room for animals and plants and even rocks (particularly in Nancy). For these reasons, I find Levinas and Nancy more compelling than Deleuzian approaches for thinking through the ethics of film.

   Finally, in contrast to Deleuze-and-Guattarian models, which tend to move away from the language of difference and towards that of becoming, my account is still invested in formulating how to conceive of difference. The model developed in Chapter 3, drawing on Levinas, emphasises difference based on the unknowability of the other as opposed to a recognition or identity-based model.⁶³ The feminist perspective offered here attempts to forge a complex middle ground between approaches that are entrenched in sexual difference as the key to understanding spectatorship and Deleuzian approaches which may miss sexed identity altogether in their emphasis on flows and molecular becomings. As Elena del Río writes in her book on Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance, ‘A Deleuzian model of the body as an impersonal flow of forces may arguably fall short of meeting the political needs of a feminist position that still finds it necessary to differentiate between the sexes, and to maintain a distinct notion of female subjectivity as individuated molar identity.’⁶⁴Rather than completely doing away with identity, I acknowledge the tension between real and materially productive categories and their inadequacy with respect to accounting for the world and our capabilities. Chapter 2, for example, discusses Nénette and Boni’s depiction of teen pregnancy and the ways in which Denis challenges stereotypical images of motherhood to move us towards something else entirely; that is, a focus on an exposure to the other’s singularity, a sensory and dynamic encounter that cannot be fully understood or finalised. This is in contrast to a notion of representation that enables clear meaning and completion. Rather than turning to Deleuzian forces and syntheses at the pre-individual level, the focus is on how we encounter the other through cinema. As Adrián Pérez Malgosa writes in his book on affect and intercultural cinema, he wants to ‘theorize film and cinematic reception as areas of cultural tension where the subject both emerges and is constantly questioned’.⁶⁵ In a sense, the emergence and interrogation of the subject is a process that my project echoes – cinema participates in producing particular forms of subjectivity, and is also a site where it is continually brought into question and reconfigured. The ongoing solidification of the subject and its paradoxically tandem dissolution applies both to the spectator and to the characters within Denis’s filmic worlds. The tension between identities and their limitations with respect to accounting for our interrelated and complex experiences are key to the model put forth here." (Towards a Feminist Cinematic Ethics: Claire Denis, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, Kristin Lené Hole, 2016, pp. 20–22)

Erkenntnistheorie

Neuroästhetic

Musikologie

Ästhetik