From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth (...) and twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this “sonic flux.” Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general. (shrink)

I am an audiovisual artist, designer, and researcher. Since 2015, I have been working on a practice-based research project that explores sonic value and sonic identity in the field of fashion design. My research project "Aesthetics of the Invisible: Toward a Sonic Fashion Ontology" focuses on the nonvisual aesthetics of fashion and uses speculative design methods to explore the possibilities of forming future sonic identities. By considering the ways in which we could reconceive fashion as (...) a sonic experience, my research aims to inspire alternative forms of design thinking for fashion design education that would reflect fashion's nonvisual aspects.We are born into a humanly developed world that is already designed.... (shrink)

This essay is about how artists, listeners and critics claim to hear life in a sound and how this suggestive, but hazily defined, provocation connects vast cultural circuits of production, technology and capital. I argue that claims to life in a sound also belie an anachronistic return to an early modern understanding of sound as particulate matter and suggest a technoscientific discourse in which sound and data are described in terms of one another. With a close engagement with microsounds – (...) from Gilles Deleuze to computer music specialist Curtis Roads – this essay queries what sonic particulates are presumed to be when they are mapped onto Spinoza’s corpora simplicissima but processed through analogy synthesis or digital tools. In part, this essay tries to speak to a persistent separation of sonic materiality and auditory culture, in music and sound studies in which life in a sound cannot be thought apart from how life is subject to different kinds of extractions. With a return to Spinoza’s physics, this essay also retakes the often sloganized “no one knows what a body can do” to emphasize an ethical recomposition of the text in which to “know” must be as open-ended as “body” is typically emphasized to be. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the aesthetic and discursive gap between music and contemporary art, and the recent attempts to remedy this in the field of New Music through a notion of “New Conceptualism.” It examines why, despite musical sources being central to the emergence of conceptual artistic strategies in the 1950s and ’60s, the worlds of an increasingly transmedial “generic art” and music have remained largely distinct. While it takes New Music’s New Conceptualism as its focus, it argues (...) that the perspective on New Music it takes has wider implications in music and art. It begins by defining what exactly “New Music” refers to, and outlines some of the conditions for the recent rise of conceptualism in New Music. It then takes the work of the composer Johannes Kreidler as a key example of some artistic tendencies and theoretical presuppositions in New Conceptualism. Following this it draws on work in the field of sound studies in order to critically examine the theoretical attempt to connect New Music with contemporary art that is found in the notion of “Music in the Expanded Field.” To conclude it offers some reflections on how a more robust conversation between contemporary art and New Music can begin to be conceived. (shrink)

In this article, I develop and redirect Julian Henriques’s model of sonic dominance through examination of accounts of acoustic violence and torture involving headphones. Specifically, I show how auditory experience has been weaponized as an intracorporeal phenomenon, with headphones effecting a sense of sounds invading the interior phenomenological space of the head. By analysing reported cases of sonic violence and torture involving headphones through a composite theoretical lens drawn from the fields of music, sound and body studies, I (...) argue that in saturating the head’s perceived interior with sound, perpetrators of violence perform sonic dominance across two interrelated levels: the subjugation of interiorized auditory space via the notion of flooding, in which attention is directed towards the experience of the body as a vessel for sound; and the resulting manipulation of phenomenological head–mind linkages, with emphasis on the head as a ‘space’ for both sound and thought. (shrink)

Bodily methodologies that engage with the affective, rhythmic, and temporal dimensions of movement have altered the landscape of social science and humanities research. Walking is one such methodology by which scholars have examined vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation. Extending this rich field, this article invokes the concept trans to reconceptualize walking research through theories that attend to the vitality and agency of matter, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, the importance of mediation and (...) bodily affect, and the necessity of acknowledging ethico-political responsibility. While theoretical and empirical research about embodied, emplaced, and sensorial relations between moving bodies and space are well developed in the field of walking studies, their entanglements become profoundly altered by theories of trans – transcorporeality, transspecies, and transmaterialities. Taking up trans theories we experiment in thinking-with a sonic art performance, Walking to the Laundromat, which probes bodily, affective, and gendered labour. (shrink)

This review has already been published in Theory, Culture and Society, June 17, 2015. We gratefully thank Paola Crespi for the permission to reproduce it. Eleni IKONIADOU, The Rhythmic Event. Art, Media, and the Sonic, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2014, 117 pages. A much-needed contribution to the field of media philosophy, sound and digital studies, this book is petit and extremely dense. Part of Brian Massumi and Erin Manning's Technologies of Livedion series with MIT Press, - Recensions.

The Body in Sound, Music and Performance brings together cutting-edge contributions from women working on and researching contemporary sound practice. This highly interdisciplinary book features a host of international contributors and places emphasis on developments beyond the western world, including movements growing across Latin America. Within the book, the body is situated as both the site and centre for knowledge making and creative production. Chapters explore how insightful theoretical analysis, new methods, innovative practises, and sometimes within the socio-cultural conditions of (...) racism, sexism and classicism, the body can rise above, reshape and deconstruct understood ideas about performance practices, composition, and listening/sensing. This book will be of interest to both practitioners and researchers in the fields of sonic arts, sound design, music, acoustics and performance. (shrink)

Capturing information means for every organism acquiring knowledge about the living and not living objects that exist in its surroundings. In this way, the “historical” concept of Umwelt, as a subjective surrounding has been recently integrated in the theory of landscape ecology where a landscape is not only a geographical entity but also a cognitive medium. The landscape may be considered a semiotic context used by the organisms to locate resources heterogeneously distributed in space and time. In particular, inside a (...) landscape there are different eco-fields defined as spatial arrangements of objects carrier of meaning that organisms utilize to track resources. Along this epistemic path the sonic component of the landscape is an important carrier of information commonly used by the majority of animal species to managing many vital functions. In particular birds, which are animals with a complex system of acoustic communication, seem to organize acoustic centers for public information. These sonic patterns (soundtopes) are characterized by a great variability in space and time and function like a special eco-field that allows species to share information about the status of resources and the dynamics of populations. The availability of such public information avoids a deeper and more expensive exploration of the environment to assess its quality. (shrink)

Bioacoustics is an interdisciplinary field bridging biological and acoustic sciences, which uses sound technologies to record, preserve, and analyse large datasets of animal communications. But it is also a world, made of the meanings created through inter- and intra-species communication. This article empirically explores a variety of bioacoustics research, including interviews with researchers, as part of a broader qualitative study, in order to theorize the expanding sense and sensation of a global biosphere and sonic data. By giving a (...) sustained and detailed account of the science of bioacoustics, particularly how its modes of measurement allow for a new way of understanding what is involved in the de-centred modes of hearing that re-centre acts of listening and, by extension, the nature of the relation between researcher and researched, the article contributes to methodological discussions regarding the longstanding questions of how researchers and scientists are implicated in the knowledge and objects they collectively produce. (shrink)

In 1981 Unruh proposed that fluid mechanical experiments could be used to probe key aspects of the quantum phenomenology of black holes. In particular, he claimed that an analogue to Hawking radiation could be created within a fluid mechanical `dumb hole', with the event horizon replaced by a sonic horizon. Since then an entire sub-field of `analogue gravity' has been created. In 2016 Steinhauer reported the experimental observation of quantum Hawking radiation and its entanglement in a Bose-Einstein condensate (...) analogue black hole. What can we learn from such analogue experiments? In particular, in what sense can they provide evidence of novel phenomena such as black hole Hawking radiation? (shrink)

This article offers a sonic reading of Gilles Deleuze’s political philosophy. It argues that Deleuze adopts a sonic-musical vocabulary to account for the affective and corporeal dimensions of politics or the ways that bodies and nonconscious forces shape political and epistemological experience. Suggesting that sonic expressions operate on both the musical and the linguistic register and inflect bodies before being consciously recognized, the article thus explores how the sound flows involved in political assemblages also find entrance into (...) philosophical concepts. To make this argument, the article traces several sonic figures – most prominently refrain, rhythm, and resonance – throughout Deleuze’s _oeuvre_ and puts those into conversation with sound studies scholarship. With this, the article makes two wider contributions. First, it traces connections between Deleuze’s early philosophical works and his later more overtly political collaborations with Guattari by way of sound to establish a notion of the political as an aesthetic-ecological field composed with and beyond human activity. Second, the article outlines parameters of a sonic political philosophy centered on affective involvement, embodied listening, and experimental thinking, thus also articulating the relevance of sound studies scholarship for political theory and Deleuzian philosophy. (shrink)

The definition of sonification has been reframed in recent years but remains somewhat in flux; the basic concepts and procedural flows have remained relatively unchanged. Recent definitions have focused on the objective the important uses of sonification in terms of scientific method. The full realization of the potential of the field must also include the craft and art of music composition. The author proposes examining techniques of sonification in a two-order framework: direct and procedural. The impact of new technologies (...) and historical roots of that work argues that framing this broad topic should be in terms inclusive of scientific method and craftsmanship and art. The expressive use of sonic time-based data flows needs to be refined and expanded. The unexamined territory of how a broad-based population of listeners on a subjective, as well as objective level needs, have to be included in this new field. (shrink)

We tackle the philosophical implications of post-2020 music practices. To situate our discussion, we address pending issues in current definitions of music-making. Our analysis indicates that post-2020 definitions of music should feature sonic information and events, framed through social interactions and through the material grounding of the musical activity. Ubiquitous music furnishes a promising playing field for the emerging aspects of creative music-thinking. New frameworks that encompass the dynamic, multimodal and situated characteristics of music while skewing an anthropocentric (...) perspective on creativity may provide meaningful targets for ubimus research toward a new notion of musicality. Three artistic projects serve to exemplify key aspects of this proposal: Atravessamentos, Memory Tree and Lyapunov Time. We address the philosophical implications of these artistic endeavors toward the construction of ubimus philosophical frameworks. (shrink)

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 30 features lectures given in 2010 at Princeton University; Yale University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Utah; Stanford University; Clare Hall, Cambridge University; Harvard University; and Brasenose (...) College, Oxford University. CONTRIBUTORS: Bruce Ackerman, “The Decline and Fall of the American Republic” Bruce Ackerman is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale and the author of fifteen books that have had a broad influence in political philosophy, constitutional law, and public policy. John Adams, “Doctor Atomic and His Gadgets” John Adams is a musician, composer, writer, and conductor whose work stands out for its depth of expression, its sonic brilliance, and the profoundly humanist nature of its themes. Isabel Allende, “In the Hearts of Women” Isabel Allende is a social activist and feminist whose novels and memoirs have established her as one of the most res-pected writers of our time. Abdullahi An-Nacim, “Transcending Imperialism: Human Values and Global Citizenship” Abdullahi Ahmed An-Nacim is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School and an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights in cross-­cultural perspectives. Mark Danner, “Torture and the Forever War” Mark Danner is a writer, journalist, and professor who has written for more than two decades on foreign affairs and international conflict. Sir Christopher Frayling, “Art and Religion in the Modern West: Some Perspectives” Sir Christopher Frayling is a historian, critic, and an award-winning broadcaster on British network radio and television. He has written seventeen books on the arts and popular culture. Jonathan Lear, “Becoming Human Does Not Come That Easily” Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and the Depart-ment of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His research and writings focus on philosophical conceptions of the human psyche. Ahmed Rashid, “Afghanistan” and “Pakistan” Ahmed Rashid is a reporter from Pakistan whose unique knowledge of this complex region allows him a panoramic vision and nuanced perspective that no Western writer can emulate. (shrink)

The public release of datasets on the internet by government agencies, environmental scientists, political groups and many other organizations has fostered a social practice of data visualization. The audiences have expectations of production values commensurate with their daily experience of professional visual media. At the same time, access to this data has allowed visual designers and artists to apply their skills to what was previously a field dominated by scientists and engineers. The ‘aesthetic turn’ in data visualization has sparked (...) debates between the new wave and older more scientifically grounded schools of thought on the topic. Sonification is not as well known or commonly practiced as visualization. But sound is a naturally affective, aesthetic and cultural medium. The extension of the aesthetic turn to sonification could transform this field from a scientific curiosity and engineering instrument into a popular mass medium. This paper proposes that a design approach can facilitate an aesthetic turn in sonification that integrates aesthetics and functionality by dissolving divisions between scientific and artistic methods. The first section applies the design perspective to the definition of sonification by replacing the linguistic concept of representation with non-verbal concept of functionality. The next section describes applications of the TaDa design method that raised aesthetic issues particular to sonification practice. The final section proposes a pragmatic aesthetics that distinguishes sonification from the auditory sciences and sonic arts. A design perspective may lead to a future where the general public tunes into pop sonifications for listening enjoyment as well as useful information about the world. (shrink)

This article takes as its focus the concept of the ‘afterimage’ and its relationship to memory, the synaesthetic experience of perception and the multisensory turn within the study of photographic images. Afterimages have consistently been described as phenomena of visual persistence where, optically, a recorded moment of the past leaks into the present and remains visible before us on our retinas. By recasting this originary understanding of an afterimage as simply a ghostly, optical occurrence and insisting that the phenomenon exceeds (...) the visual and is rather an intersensorial occurrence, I seek to present how encounters with images stay with us in powerful ways and across many senses at once. As an intervention within the field of image theory and photography studies that builds upon the relatively recent turn away from prioritizing visuality and instead shifting towards multisensoriality – what we might also term as the ‘more-than visual’ – this piece proposes that if images exceed the visual and carry with them physical, haptic, sonic and affective qualities, then perhaps the afterimage is not something that we merely see but also what we can feel and hear and move-with. Perhaps the afterimage carries an intensity and an afterlife which lingers in our minds and can take hold of our entire body and our senses, composing and recomposing them over time. By pairing such inquiries alongside the narrative, literary and poetic works of Dionne Brand and Nathaniel Mackey – both of whom write of the intersensorial quality of photographs and afterimages with a particular kind of lively openness – I am hoping to intervene into the ongoing ‘more-than visual’ turn within the field of image theory by infusing it with a narrative-oriented synaesthetic vocabulary. (shrink)

Timo Maran has defined “biosemiotic criticism” as the study of human culture with an emphasis on the recognition that all forms of life are organized by sign processes. That approach guides this investigation of the sonic devices and practices that have been used in encounters between birds and humans in agricultural spaces. “Bird-scaring” has been a long-standing component of the semiotic relationship between humans and birds in what I am calling the agricultural semiosphere. The struggle between humans and “pest” (...) species over the control of agricultural resources has spurred technological development, and an examination of the sonic tools that have been involved in bird-scaring practices, from wooden rattles to digital sound recordings, intersects with scholarship on sound technology and media studies. The field of ecoacoustics provides a conceptual framework for the sonic dynamics of the interspecies communication under examination. To the extent that the essay also explores the sign relations between humans and birds it has a place in the growing corpus of biosemiotic criticism. The historical account of bird-scaring practices is presented in three sections, demarcated by changes in technology as well as shifts in the mode of semiotic reference. Across the analysis, a historical approach to bird-scaring is interwoven with a discussion of biosemiotic and ecoacoustic themes and concepts. (shrink)

Noise permeates our highly mediated and globalised cultures. Noise as art, music, cultural or digital practice is a way of intervening so that it can be harnessed for an aesthetic expression not caught within mainstream styles or distribution. This wide-ranging book examines the concept and practices of noise, treating noise not merely as a sonic phenomenon but as an essential component of all communication and information systems. The book opens with ideas of what noise is, and then works through (...) ideas of how noise works in contemporary media, to conclude by showing potentials within noise for a continuing cultural renovation through experimentation. Considered in this way, noise is seen as an essential yet excluded element of contemporary culture that demands a rigorous engagement. Reverberations brings together a range of perspectives, case studies, critiques and suggestions as to how noise can mobilize thought and cultural activity through a heightening of critical creativity.Written by a strong, international line-up of scholars and artists, Reverberations looks to energize this field of study and initiate debates for years to come. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This issue invites us to consider examples of feminist cultural production that use music, graphic art, and film to resist sexual conventions. Andrea Wood turns our attention to lesbian sex and romance in comics, a genre that has long captivated lay readers and is gaining popularity in academic circles. Rachel Lumsden analyzes Ethel Smyth’s 1913 musical composition “Possession,” an ode to same-sex intimacy displaying a “sonic meld” (...) of passion, desire, and political commitment. Sharmila Lodhia’s account of Nina Paley’s film Sita Sings the Blues considers how a sexually charged anitmated representation of a traditional epic can spur battles over cultural authenticity. Ariane Cruz examines how sexual pleasure presses against racist histories in a study on black women and BDSM. Whether sexuality is policed, as Chloë Taylor explores in her article, or the policing of sexuality is shunned, as Lynn Comella addresses in her review essay, it is clear that the grip of sexual politics on women ’s sexual lives is strong. Wang Zheng’s News and Views piece recounts recent global feminist tactics used to release five young feminists jailed in China, an urgent reminder about how women’s bodies are policed in violent ways. We begin this issue with Chloë Taylor’s essay reflecting on how sexology and psychiatry function to represent female desire in narrow ways. Taylor explores how female sexual dysfunction is constructed in sexology and psychiatric practice and locates this as part of a longer history of rendering selected bodies and sexual practices as deviant. Her analysis is a valuable rejoinder to the ever-expanding grip of psychiatry on the ordering—and disordering—of women’s bodies and sexuality. The line between normal and abnormal is always shifting, but its constant is how it maneuvers and is maneuvered to control female sexual desire. Taylor’s argument moves toward a non-normalizing feminist sexology that can interrogate sexual practice and function without rendering any as “right” or “wrong.” 256Preface Andrea Wood also turns to female sexuality, specifically lesbian sex, love, and romance, in her article on comics as a literary genre. Lesbian romance comics, Wood argues, offer a different discursive lens for “making the invisible visible.” Using queer theory to interrogate romantic depictions of lesbian sex and sexuality, she explores how the visual narrative form of comics allows for a different and politically compelling depiction of lesbian identity and sexual activity. Although lesbian romance and same-sex desire has been an interest of many feminist scholars, few have examined the visual field of lesbian comics—a genre, Wood insists, that demonstrates resistance to what Adrienne Rich identified as “compulsory heterosexuality.” Rachel Lumsden draws our attention to composer Ethel Smyth’s understudied song “Possession.” The song is a rumination on what it means to possess something or someone, and what it means to be possessed ; it is also a song that Smyth dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst, her political comrade as well as her close friend and muse. Lumsden reads the song as a creative, strategically ambiguous “ode to an intimate female relationship,” a tribute to the respect, affection, and tenderness that Pankhurst and Smyth shared. Rather than reveal the “truth” of Smyth’s relationship with Pankhurst, Lumsden instead invites readers to consider the “sonic meld” of “Possession” as a space through which “themes of desire, activism, eroticism, solidarity, and sacrifice coalesce and congeal ” and as a site through which Smyth narrated her experiences, passions, desires, and political commitments. Sharmila Lodhia engages the controversy surrounding Nina Paley’s re-telling of the Ramayana in her film Sita Sings the Blues, which some critics have deemed “offensive,” “insulting,” and a “desecration of the Ramayana and the Hindu faith.” Lodhia treats Paley’s film—which positions Sita rather than Ram as the story’s protagonist, deploys animation and myriad narrator perspectives, fuses Paley’s own story with Sita’s story, and sets the story to a 1920s blues soundtrack—as a productive “body of critique about the epic’s central teachings on virtue, righteousness, and idealized gender roles.” By situating Paley’s retelling of the Ramayana in the context of numerous and varied Ramayana retellings, Lodhia reveals that Sita Sings the Blues is a “creative... (shrink)

Investigating the concepts and material realities of energy coursing through the arts: a foundational text. This book investigates energies—in the plural, the energies embedded and embodied in everything under the sun— as they are expressed in the arts. With contributions from scholars and critics from the visual arts, art history, anthropology, music, literature, and the history of science, it offers the first multidisciplinary investigation of the concepts and material realities of energy coursing through the arts. Just as Douglas Kahn's earlier (...) books helped introduce sound as a category for study in the arts, this new volume will be a foundational volume for future explorers in a largely uncharted domain. The modern concept of energy is only two hundred years old—an abstraction grounded in extraction—but this book takes a more expansive view. It opens with a clap: the sonic energies in a ceremony of the indigenous Goolarabooloo people of Australia. Other chapters explore the energies of photography; responses of artists in the early twentieth century—including Marcel Duchamp—to scientific discoveries in electricity and electromagnetism; the aestheticization of entropy in works by Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson; free-jazz musician Milford Graves's cross-cultural engagement with music, science, and spiritualism; energy field performance; and the self-generating energy of rumor and gossip as artwork. Contributors include such leading scholars as Linda Dalrymple Henderson, John Tresch, and Caroline A. Jones. Practicing artists and students of art history will find Energies in the Arts an essential work. Contributors Susan Ballard, Jennifer Biddle, Marcus Boon, Joan Brassil, Steven Connor, Milford Graves, Daniel Hackbarth, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Caroline A. Jones, Douglas Kahn, David Mather, Stephen Muecke, James Nisbet, Daniela Silvestrin, Michael Taussig, John Tresch, Melissa Warak. (shrink)

What can the sounds of today tell us about the future? Can an analysis of sound and sonic practices allow us to make reliable predictions in relation to wider social phenomena? And what might they tell us about technology in a world where futurology is such a frenzied and busy field? In order to answer these questions, this book tests a range of propositions that connect noise, sound and music to political, economic and technological events. Hence it is (...) a book about historical trajectories and conflicting ideas about time and the necessity to re-contextualize and interpret them in the digital age. (shrink)

Nature's simplest atom and mother of all matter, hydrogen feeds the stars as well as interlaces the molecules of their biological descendants – to whom it ultimately whispers the secrets of quantum reality. Hydrogen’s most prevalent earthly guise lies within the composition of water. A slight electrical disturbance can split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas, resulting in diaphanous bubble clouds slowly rising towards the liquid’s surface. Though the founding fathers of electrochemistry posited that the mass of liberated bubbles is (...) directly proportional to the input voltage, certain modes of electrolysis release more energy than is spent. One such mode involves water’s Janus-faced capacity to react as either an acid or a base. Emanating from an array of electrodes at the bottom of a water-filled chamber, strings and strata of hydrogen bubbles meticulously trace their emergent surroundings. In addition to eddy formations incited by a bubble's rapid growth and subsequent detachment from the electrode surface, acoustic vibrations permeate the two-phase fluid. As the sonic frequency and amplitude rises, the hydrogen bubbles start to coalesce with one another. When the sound field reaches maximum intensity, it can trap bubbles within its antinodes. The vibrations are generated both by transducers and by the bubbles themselves, which emit frequencies ranging from the audible spectrum to as high as 800 kHz. A white laser sheet scans and illuminates the hydrogen bubble trajectories. Each quivering bubble-lens divides the white light into its constituent spectrum of colors. While scanning, the laser sheet also swiftly pulsates and thereby extends the perceivable resolution of micro-momentary bubble dynamics. Before it even begins to map out its vibratory environment, a bubble goes through various stages of spatio-temporal evolution. During the first phase of growth, a bubble nucleus inflates linearly with time. At the second stage, bubble growth is limited by the diffusion of gas within the liquid, causing its size to increase as the square root of time. The final phase before detachment is limited by the kinetics of dissolved gas production, causing the bubble to grow as the cube root of time.1 Beyond macroscopically observable bubbles, an expanse of nanobubbles hides within the water’s internal architecture. Some researchers presume that these nanobubbles of dissolved gas are the carriers of water’s magnetic ‘memory’, enabling electromagnetic fields to saturate its innards for hours and even days after their initial appearance. In the seas and oceans, the lingering presence of electromagnetic fields photonically imparted by sunlight, triggers the electrolysis responsible for most of the Earth’s hydrogen. An essential form of photosynthesis, solar water splitting is the cleanest and most efficient means imaginable for generating and storing energy. —Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand *** Animals and plants are formed in earth and in water because there is water in earth, and there is pneuma in water, and there is soul heat in all pneuma ; so that in a way all things are full of soul. Hence plants and animals quickly form once this gets enclosed; and when this enclosing happens, when the corporeal liquids get heated, a sort of frothy bubble is formed. Now the difference between the various creatures which are produced in this way are due to the stuff which makes up the envelope around the soul-source.2 Throwing light into this pneumatic spray of perdurances, which would otherwise swarm below the threshold of human visibility, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand’s Hydrogeny saturates the viewer’s sensorial space with the nano-architectures of froth. Straddling the cell wall between scientific enquiry and artistic praxis, Hydrogeny , beckons a recasting of Lucretius' clinamen in tune with the technologies of the modern observer. For Lucretius it was the indeterminate swerving of an atomistic layer of reality which accounted for the unpredictability of change and the existence of free will. Taken up by Harold Bloom to describe the swerving of cultural production from that which has already been made, the idea has since been textually redressed by Lacan, Derrida, Serres, Deleuze, Nancy, and Badiou. Here we have been given a kaleidoscopic technique for refining and expanding awareness of our enmeshment with so many nested, atomistic layers of object-bubbles—of things—as Aristotle might say,“full of soul.” The gravitational pull of Hydrogeny ushers a de-centered human spectatorship to the ever more intimate recesses of what media philosopher N. Katherine Hayles calls our capacity for “deep attention.”3 Vaporous attention suspended and re-oriented. Microscopic as these diaphanous waves are, the calling they produce is anything but inconsequential. Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand are two-thirds of the Amsterdam-based Art–Science Labratory, Optofonica , an atelier initiated by the Italian interdisciplinary artist TeZ in 2006. Follow more of their work at www.portablepalace.com —Isaac Linder NOTES (1) cf. Brandon, Kelsall, Levine, & Smith. “Interfacial Electrical Properties of Electrogenerated Bubbles.” Journal of Applied Electrochemistry 15 (1985):485-493. (2)Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, 762a18, tr. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1942). (3)“ My article on hyper and deep attention ,” N. Katherine Hayles, accessed on September 14, 2011. (shrink)

Exploring a wide range of sonic practices, from birdsong in the Marshall Islands to Zulu ululation, the contributors reorient the field of sound studies toward the global South in order to rethink and decolonize modes of understanding and listening to sound.

This article deals with the reframing of the concept of universal mediated communication on a global scale. Subjects include the following: the universe has a conscious force field at all its scales, requiring continuous inter-scale communication of information; the field exhibits distinct electromagnetic frequencies associated with the building blocks of life; and advances in the technology of sound production with electronic synthesizers can be applied to study mechanisms of such universal communication. The question being addressed is how electronic (...) synthesizers can be used to create sonic xenolinguistic expressions when composing with sonified frequencies obtained from bio-organisms, human protein structures, phonemes and various types of interstellar frequencies that include, but are not limited to, gamma bursts, pulsars and neutron stars. The objective is to construct sonic xenolingusitic expressions that can act like feedback loops within the field of consciousness. These sonic expressions can include anomalous cognitive, emotive or spiritual experiences that may be emerging out of the universal field of consciousness in real time. Xenolinguistics is a hypothetical language used to communicate with other sentient beings in the universe. The rationale for composing sonic xenolingustic expressions is the belief that the universe is considered conscious and that there is a field of consciousness existing throughout the universe that in principle is also instrumental in how communication can evolve with extraterrestrials. Outlines of other attempts at extraterrestrial communication by other researchers will be offered based on current literature. The probability that other life forms have established some mode of information exchange that is detectable and that, in return, may be able to create a form of communication to respond will be covered. It is postulated that various energy fields existing before and after the creation of our universe interacted with one another becoming abiotic, and then over time, formed even more complex structures. It is these complex structures that were then able to communicate essential information for maintaining their stability and survivability by using specific signalling frequencies. It is hypothesized that first life in the universe emerged within an already existing field of information and that our consciousness is thereby able to establish communication with other forms of consciousness in the universe. It is on this basis that a novel scientific and philosophical paradigm is considered in which the universe is conceived of as an active information matrix that can entertain potential extraterrestrial communication. In this framework, the present article will offer a new approach to orchestrated electronic sounds as a means to such communication. By integrating quantum physical properties into that sonic framework, a new study emerged on how sonic xenolinguistic elements can be incorporated into electronic composition techniques. This new framework may produce new algorithms for musical expression that not only represent an innovative future of electronic music but may also be crucial in the formulation and induction of new states of consciousness that will enable humankind to directly participate in the further becoming of the universe as a result of the evolution of this universal field of consciousness. (shrink)

2020 has been called the year of silence for a reason. Actions such as lockdown taken by the majority of countries in the world aiming at preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 virus influenced many different areas including surrounding us soundscape. Devoid of noise and sounds associated with human activity soundscape of cities attracted attention not only of researchers and sound ecologists but also people not professionally related to sound studies. Such a great interest in sound space was primarily due to (...) the scale of the changes that affected it. In order to better understand the nature of these changes and the response to them, I begin by presenting the state of the audiosphere before the pandemic, as well as the achievements in the field of acoustic ecology—a research direction that emerged in response to the state of sound space at the time. Referring to the writings of acoustic ecology pioneer Raymond M. Schafer and the continuators of his thought I present the role of sound in the city and its impact on humans. I also explain terms that have emerged from soundscape studies that make it easier to navigate the issues I am addressing. The knowledge presented in this way provides a starting point for understanding the sound pandemic situation, which I draw on the basis of a review of popular science literature such as BBC Future, Scientific American and The Washington Post. Using them, I present the areas in which audible changes took place and the reactions to these changes. I also describe the educational action taken at the time to explain the audible situation and to exploit its sonic potential. This overview concludes with an attempt to outline the future of the urban soundscape, based on the opinions of the authors of the mentioned publications as well as my own conclusions. (shrink)

This book is an interdisciplinary project that brings together ideas from aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, and music sociology as an expansion of German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory on the aesthetics of play. This way of thinking focuses on an ontology of the process of musicking rather than an ontology of discovering fixed and static musical objects. In line with this idea, the author discusses the importance of participation and involvement in this process of musicking, whether as a listener or as a (...) performer. Christensen then goes on to critique and update Gadamer's theory by presenting incompatibilities between it and recent theories of aesthetic emotions and embodiment. He proposes that emotions are ‘constructed’ rather than ‘caused’, that the mind uses a system of ‘filters’ to respond to sonic stimuli and thus constructs aesthetic feelings and experiences. In turn, this approach provides music with a route into the development of social capital and inter-subjective communication. This work builds on the hermeneutical steps already taken by Gadamer and those before him, continuing his line of thought beyond his work. It will be of great interest to scholars in music aesthetics as well as a variety of other music related fields, including music psychology, philosophy and science and technology studies. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art presents an overview of the issues, methods, and approaches crucial for the study of sound in artistic practice. Thirty-six essays cover a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to studying sounding art from the fields of musicology, cultural studies, sound design, auditory culture, art history, and philosophy. The companion website hosts sound examples and links to further resources. The collection is organized around six main themes: Sounding Art: The notion of sounding art, its relation to sound (...) studies, and its evolution and possibilities. Acoustic Knowledge and Communication: How we approach, study, and analyze sound and the challenges of writing about sound. Listening and Memory: Listening from different perspectives, from the psychology of listening to embodied and technologically mediated listening. Acoustic Spaces, Identities and Communities: How humans arrange their sonic environments, how this relates to sonic identity, how music contributes to our environment, and the ethical and political implications of sound. Sonic Histories: How studying sounding art can contribute methodologically and epistemologically to historiography. Sound Technologies and Media: The impact of sonic technologies on contemporary culture, electroacoustic innovation, and how the way we make and access music has changed. With contributions from leading scholars and cutting-edge researchers, The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art is an essential resource for anyone studying the intersection of sound and art. (shrink)

Published in 1977, The tuning of the world by Raymond Murray Schafer, inaugu-rated the soundscape studies, that have shaped much further research, interweav-ing different disciplinary fields, and are based around the concept of sound as a meta-category that both encompasses and transcends music. These studies invite us to reflect on the relationship between human beings and sound environment, on the responsibility of each individual in sharing the soundscape as a common and collective heritage and, more generally, on the ability to (...) exercise hearing as a medium of understanding of the world. (shrink)

"Combining aspects of his acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture, Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding has concentrated closely on these children's features and gestures, probing the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior. Design, composition, and the play of light and shadow are central elements in these photographs, but the images are much more than formal experiments; they confront disability in a way that affirms life. Fielding's sightless subjects project a vitality that seems to extend beyond the limits of (...) self-consciousness. In collaborative, joyful participation with the children, he has made pictures that reveal essential gestures of absorption and the basic expressions of our creatureliness. Fielding's work achieves what only great art, and particularly great portraiture can: it launches and then complicates a process of identification across the barriers that separate us from each other. (shrink)

Both in dealing with the semantic paradoxes and in dealing with vagueness and indeterminacy, there is some temptation to weaken classical logic: in particular, to restrict the law of excluded middle. The reasons for doing this are somewhat different in the two cases. In the case of the semantic paradoxes, a weakening of classical logic (presumably involving a restriction of excluded middle) is required if we are to preserve the naive theory of truth without inconsistency. In the case of vagueness (...) and indeterminacy, there is no worry about inconsistency; but a central intuition is that we must reject the factual status of certain sentences, and it hard to see how we can do that while claiming that the law of excluded middle applies to those sentences. So despite the different routes, we have a similar conclusion in the two cases. (shrink)

The paper presents a kind of normative anti-realist view of epistemology, in the same ballpark as recent versions of expressivism. But the primary focus of the paper is less on this meta-epistemological view itself than on how it should affect ground-level issues in epistemology: for instance, how it should deal with certain forms of skepticism, and how it allows for fundamental revision in epistemic practices. It is hoped that these methodological consequences will seem attractive independent of the normative anti-realism. Indeed, (...) some normative realists seem to embrace the view on skepticism, but it is argued that their position is unstable: the realism undermines the methodology. The general theme of the paper is that the issue of normative realism is deeply entwined with issues of methodology, in strong contrast to the common claim that meta-epistemological views in the tradition of expressivism have no first order impact. (shrink)

A natural question to raise about words—or about their mental analogue, concepts—is: in virtue of what facts do they refer to whatever it is that they refer to? In virtue of what does the word ‘insanity’ refer to insanity, the word ‘entropy’ refer to entropy, and so forth? There is a view called “disquotationalism” according to which this question is misconceived. I’ll have something to say about that later. But putting disquotationalism aside for now, it would seem that this question (...) about words or concepts needs an answer. And the only kind of answer we can take seriously is a naturalistic answer: the Brentanian answer that words or concepts refer by virtue of irreducibly mental connections between the mind and the world is not a serious contender. What if no naturalistic answer is possible? If we put disquotationalism aside, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the assumption that ‘insanity’ and ‘entropy’ determinately refer to insanity and to entropy is an illusion. (shrink)

The Ollivier–Poulin–Zurek definition of objectivity provides a philosophical basis for the environment as witness formulation of decoherence theory and hence for quantum Darwinism. It is shown that no account of the reference of the key terms in this definition can be given that does not render the definition inapplicable within quantum theory. It is argued that this is not the fault of the language used, but of the assumption that the laws of physics are independent of Hilbert-space decomposition. All evidence (...) suggests that this latter assumption is true. If it is, decoherence cannot explain the emergence of classicality. (shrink)

The book concludes by examining how we might bring such transformation about.Written by two of the leading experts in the fields of early childhood and ...

The paper shows how we can add a truth predicate to arithmetic (or formalized syntactic theory), and keep the usual truth schema Tr( ) ↔ A (understood as the conjunction of Tr( ) → A and A → Tr( )). We also keep the full intersubstitutivity of Tr(>A>)) with A in all contexts, even inside of an →. Keeping these things requires a weakening of classical logic; I suggest a logic based on the strong Kleene truth tables, but with → (...) as an additional connective, and where the effect of classical logic is preserved in the arithmetic or formal syntax itself. Section 1 is an introduction to the problem and some of the difficulties that must be faced, in particular as to the logic of the →; Section 2 gives a construction of an arithmetically standard model of a truth theory; Section 3 investigates the logical laws that result from this; and Section 4 provides some philosophical commentary. (shrink)

A selective background -- Broadly classical approaches -- Paracompleteness -- More on paracomplete solutions -- Paraconsistent dialetheism.

The paper offers a solution to the semantic paradoxes, one in which (1) we keep the unrestricted truth schema “True(A)↔A”, and (2) the object language can include its own metalanguage. Because of the first feature, classical logic must be restricted, but full classical reasoning applies in “ordinary” contexts, including standard set theory. The more general logic that replaces classical logic includes a principle of substitutivity of equivalents, which with the truth schema leads to the general intersubstitutivity of True(A) with A (...) within the language.The logic is also shown to have the resources required to represent the way in which sentences (like the Liar sentence and the Curry sentence) that lead to paradox in classical logic are “defective”. We can in fact define a hierarchy of “defectiveness” predicates within the language. Contrary to claims that any solution to the paradoxes just breeds further paradoxes (“revenge problems”) involving defectiveness predicates, there is a general consistency/conservativeness proof that shows that talk of truth and the various “levels of defectiveness” can all be made coherent together within a single object language. (shrink)

Michael Fielding; Against Competition, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 10, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 124–146, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1.

ABSTRACT Section 1 discusses properties and propositions, and some of the motivation for an account in which property instantiation and propositional truth behave ‘naively’. Section 2 generalizes a standard Kripke construction for naive properties and propositions, in a language with modal operators but no conditionals. Whereas Kripke uses a 3-valued value space, the generalized account allows for a broad array of value spaces, including the unit interval [0,1]. This is put to use in Section 3, where I add to the (...) language a conditional suitable for restricting quantification. The shift from a value space based on the ‘mini-space’ {0,, 1} to one based on the ‘mini-space’ [0,1] leads to more satisfactory results than I was able to achieve in previous work: a vast variety of paradoxical sentences can now be treated very simply. In Section 4 I make a further addition to the language, a conditional modeled on the ordinary English conditional, paying particular attention to how it interacts with the restricted quantifier conditional. This is all done in the [0,1] framework, and two alternatives are considered for how the ordinary conditional is to be handled; one of them results from adding a tweak to a construction by Ross Brady. Section 5 discusses a further alternative, a standard relevance conditional (for the ordinary conditional, perhaps for use with a different quantifier-restricting conditional), but argues that it is not promising. Section 6 discusses the identity conditions of properties and propositions (again in the setting of a value space based on [0,1]); the issue of achieving naivety for coarse-grained properties is seen to be more complicated than some brief remarks in Field [2010] suggested, but a way to get a fair degree of coarse-grainedness is shown. (shrink)