In the old rites, Eros appeared as an unwrought stone. And from our childhood, for some of us dim, for some of us vivid, memories remain of the way a stone could seem to be alive. The presence or protective genius of a stone could become a secret ally of oneself. For the sculptor the stone “speaks” and his work emerges along the lines of a colloquy between his listening and–out of a dumbness or meaninglessness of matter, were it not for this listening–a language of space which the stone has evoked for him…for the imagination, for the mind seeking communication, to create in its life a serious play, even inert matter is alive with person. So, for the Orphic poets, the seed of egg of the universe is created by Hyle, the primal chaos of matter.

–Robert Duncan, The HD Book

Sound invites the body into experience and reciprocally makes the object physical. Listening to sound is where objectivity and subjectivity meet: in the experience of our own generative perception we produce the objectivity from our subjective and particular position of listening, which in its turn is constituted by the objectivity of the object as a prior moment of hearing, subjective and particular. It is this particularity of the listening subject in the contingency of his experience that has to be kept in mind, in order…not to turn the individual subject already into an (objective) universal; in order, in other words, to avoid ideology and hierarchy. It is neither the thing that dominates the being nor the being that dominates the thing. They are reciprocal and equivalent, but in their momentary meeting they are also distinct. They are produced on the spot, together, in difference, any prior objectivity and prior subjectivity is invested in this momentary and complex production but does not subsume it.

–Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art

Check out Dominic Fox’s blog as well.

I’ve been looking (back) into Newton and Huygens recently for a wall piece and a poem (and how the two pieces been overlapping!) and it led me to think how the Huygens-Fresnel principle could be applied to Morton’s ideas about the mind as sampler.

The HF-principle is basically the idea that any point that is disturbed by a wave then acts as if it was a generator of the wave. Every wave moving outwards from a source also seems to emanate from every point the wave hits along the way. This is how the original sound source then can sound distorted in different ways through the additive vibrations that enter the air from the “false” points of reference. A sound loses its purity when it hits a wall and the wall sends the sound back outwards. In other instances, a sound moves through a hole in the wall, and, through what’s called single slit diffraction, the sound seems to originate from the hole.

I know this doesn’t quite correspond precisely to Morton’s idea of the mind as sensual sampler–but it, at least, helps me begin to see how mind can be a point of reception among many, adding and subtracting certain aspects of the wave. In this way, the mind, and other objects, seem to act more like a filter than a sampler–maybe we could even think of experience of the sensual, by all objects, as subtractive synthesis?

I reminded of an interview recently with Dr Jean-Baptiste Labrune where he talked about using natural objects as resistors:

In the mean time, I’m having a conversation with Jarrod Fowler about sampling, in which we agree that sampling is part of wider configuration space of non-music in which music sits like an island beset on all sides by other forms of sound and non-sound. Every sample is a translation, in that it chops a sensual slice out of an object and thereby creates another object. To that extent then, causality is a kind of sampling. Thus when we observe a phenomenon, we are always looking strictly at the past, since we are observing a sample of another object. To sample is to posit retroactively.

This would account for the uncanny quality that Nate intuits in objects (as far as I can interpret his comment—I’m sure I must have clumsily misconstrued it.) All objects have some kind of extimacy stuck to them, by dint of their being samples, and by dint of their sampling of other objects. The excessive subject is simply one of a plenum of excessive objects.

I’ve been slowly seeing how my two teaching interests found their way together and I think Morton nails it here. Samples are both new, sensual objects and also posit retroactively: k-punk and reynold’s hauntology (cf Harman’s “smoky dubstep powerpoint”) and objects of OOO.

I’m still unsure whether samples always posit retroactively though–I think this is maybe and probably the case most of the time–but I think there might be some instances when samples posit something outside the retroactive. Maybe this is just flaking dust off the retroactive seen anew–changes in envelope seeming more progressive than they are or outward ripples that seem unconnected but aren’t–but I wonder. Take, for instance, Morton’s metaphor of the island: “music sits like an island beset on all sides by other forms of sound and non-sound.”

Here’s a quote from the new David Toop book, Sinister Resonances:

The death of Pan is a story reported during the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Attributed to Epitherses, it was retold in Plutarch…and Rabelais…Epithersis was sailing from Greece to Italy. One evening a disembodied voice called out to the ship as it came near the island of Paxos. The voice cried loudly once, twice. ‘No one replied,’ wrote Rabelais, ‘but all stood silent and trembling. Then the voice was heard a third time, more terrible than before.’ This time, the pilot of the boat, an Egyptian named Thamus answered, what do you want from me? The voice commanded him to set a course for the island of Palodes and on arrival to announce that the Great God Pan is dead. Close to Palodes, the wind dropped, the ship was becalmed, and silence fell upon the scene. Reluctantly, Thamus climbed on the prow and shouted the message: Pan is dead. ‘Immediately there arose from the forest a great lamentation which resounded through the peaceful evening sky,’ wrote W.R. Irwin, in his essay, ‘The Survival of Pan’. ‘But the shore was empty; no wailing devotees could be seen.

A bunch of things to get through, but I’m interested in the movement from the first sample–Thamus singing “Pan is dead” to the island–to that of the sound coming from the lamentation coming from the “wailing devotees” who could not be seen. One sees the action of manipulating a sample in this story:

sounded object: “Pan is dead”
sampled, sensual object: “Pan is dead”
final, manipulated sensual object: UNSEEN MOANING

The first two connect to each other in much the way Morton describes. The sample represents and posits the sounded object retroactively. What to make of the third? It’s still, in some way, a retroactive positing of the first, sounded object and it also posits the journey in between–the manipulation of the sample. But! It also demonstrates something else–yes, this could be the weird underbelly of the sample object, and yes it also demonstrates the translation of the sounded object into the final manipulated object–but what to do with that final manipulated object on its own? Or:

sounded object: unseen moaning

Or: Ezra Pound sampling in the early cantos, when he has his books with him is different than the Pound of the Pisan cantos, sampling from memory. I don’t know that this has to be a moral or political difference, and I also don’t mean to bring up this example to add a necessarily human element: this is also what happens, I think, in the move to synthesized pasts in recent music–Ariel Pink, Ghost Box, etc.

I suppose an OOO related fact about musique concrète is its necessary inclusion of hidden depths and withdrawn features of each sonic object.

I just sent off an abstract on this idea where I connect these ideas to Harman’s and figured I’d post it up here as a response.

In Greg Milner’s recent history of recording media, Perfecting Sound Forever, Roger Linn—creator of the first programmable drum machine—calls “the idea of building music based around looped samples…‘object oriented composition.’” My talk will connect Linn’s idea of the sample as an object to the later, word-counted line poetry of Louis Zukofsky. In so doing, I will investigate how an object oriented composition can be informed by Graham Harman and others’ recent work within object oriented ontology. The two major questions of this paper will be: 1) how can we define one type of object oriented composition and 2) how can object oriented ontology inform an object oriented composition?
The use of sampling within music has changed the building blocks of composition from notes—pitches described in time—to, well, anything: melodic phrases, drum loops, duck calls, sirens, etc. can all be used as musical building blocks. By using software instruments these sounds can still be “played” in real time as a drummer plays a drum but, more often, pictorial representations of samples are arranged on a computer screen. The computer screen becomes the score and these representations of samples replace traditional notation. Musical events become musical objects.
A similar shift occurs in the later work of Louis Zukofsky, in which he builds his line by counting words rather than syllables. This type of measuring creates an interesting musicality to Zukofsky’s work—a chunky dissonance that reminds one of the serialists— while also introducing an idea of space to his poetry. The word as a unit of syllables is not only a sound in time meant to convey linguistic meaning, but also an object in space on the page. Like sampling in music—where a musical event in time becomes a picture in a computer program or a chunk of memory on a disk—Zukofsky’s counted line effectively re-orients the readers’ perception of the word as meaning center to the word as compositional object.
In thinking through this shift, I would like to use Graham Harman’s language of the sensual object to suggest that the word (as sample) within Zukofsky’s work can be considered as a sensual object. This brings up a few questions that will form the conclusion to my paper. With Harman, I will ask what it would it mean for the sample to “submerge its real eidos.” Even more interestingly, I will ask how the many sensual objects of a song or poem—the many different samples, the many different words— mediate between each other to form a new object. Finally, I will ask how samples “enter into some sort of genuine relation, [to] form a new integral reality” as a work of art.

I’m a little unsure of the specifics of that last paragraph–how to connect the ideas of sampling in music and Zukofsky to Harman and other work in OOO. Is it unfair to call the sample a sensual object? Is Morton’s term of the hyper-object a better one? etc. etc. Or, I’m pretty confident in the set-up–musical objects and poetic objects–but I’m less sure as to where it will take me.

Now I’m working with Johannes Hevelius’ early moon map:

Though I’m working with this part of the map specifically at the moment, just to see how the prints will turn out: