{"id":16802,"date":"2013-09-05T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T10:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=16802"},"modified":"2013-09-05T08:53:49","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T12:53:49","slug":"seeing-music-for-what-it-really-isnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/09\/05\/seeing-music-for-what-it-really-isnt\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing Music For What It Really Isn’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

or, \u201c\u2018Reality\u2019 is the only word in the language that should always be used in quote<\/a>s\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

__<\/p>\n

I get really nervous when people start making claims about what is and isn\u2019t \u201creal\u201d music. Like Princess Leia<\/a> in The Empire Strikes Back<\/em>, \u201cI have a bad feeling about this<\/a>\u201d because these arguments, like the \u201ccave\u201d the Leia was exploring, are not what they seem. Usually they use \u201cmusic\u201d as a proxy to talk about something else–gender, race, (sub)culture, class, etc. They don\u2019t have a lot to tell us about music, even though they may reveal other things, like the social values and biases implicit in the argument. I\u2019m so certain of this that I wrote a whole book<\/a> on it.<\/p>\n

As you can imagine, I was predisposed to be skeptical of fellow philosopher Alva Noe\u2019s claim<\/a> that \u201creal\u201d music is embodied performance, not recorded music, not electronic music, and most of all not sound art. Titled \u201cSeeing Music For What It Really Is,\u201d Noe\u2019s article argues that music \u201creally\u201d is is what we can see–visible bodies doing things–not what we hear. Recorded and electronic music, he argues, \u201cobscure\u201d music\u2019s true nature–its connection to embodied performance. Given his tech-skepticism and his implicit opposition between sounds and bodies, does Noe\u2019s argument lean on a digitally<\/em> dualist ontology? And what would a digital dualism do for him that another sort of dualism wouldn’t?<\/p>\n

Also, Noe\u2019s appeal to \u201cscience\u201d is troublesome. He uses scientific evidence–here, a psychological study–to argue that music is really a sociocultural practice. \u201cPhysics,\u201d he argues in the opening paragraph, \u201cis only part of the story.\u201d Indeed. (To this extent, I actually agree with Noe. But philosophers of music have known this at least since Rousseau wrote his \u201cEssay on the Origin of Languages.) \u00a0If science is only part of the story, why does it have the final word on sociocultural practices as such? If you\u2019re arguing that music is a cultural practice, it seems like ethnographic and cultural studies methodologies would be essential to determining what music \u201creally is.\u201d Instead, as music scholar avanturb<\/a> notes, Noe, like the study he references, treats music performance \u201cas an isolated thing,\u201d something observable without reference to broader cultural contexts and practices. As I\u2019ll argue below, these methodologies can help us see exactly where Noe\u2019s argument goes astray. That psychological study he cites is telling us something–not, however, about music, but about us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dualist Ontology<\/strong><\/p>\n

Noe argues that:<\/p>\n

When we listen to music we listen to a performance, in the literal sense. We pay attention to what someone, or a group of people, is doing before us. Music is action. This has has been obscured somewhat by recording, whose advent has influenced how we think about music. The idea that music is about sound, peeled off from its inherence<\/em> in the tapping, plucking, smacking, stroking, blowing, fingering and vocal actions of real people<\/em>, or, divorced from the thoughts, feelings and ideas of performers, seems somehow plausible in an era where you buy pieces of plastic, or download digital files, to get at music. In addition, electronic music has seemed, to some, to be the final blow to what may now come to seem a quaint idea: that music is an art of the body, an art of the analog transduction of physical energies<\/em>. And so we easily lose sight of the fact that what we care about, when we care about music, is not sound, but musicians and their use of movement, the body, and material instruments, to articulate significance. [emphasis mine]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cPeeled off from…real people\u201d who are \u201canalog,\u201d \u201cphysical,\u201d and \u201cmaterial\u201d—hmmmm…this sounds like a dualist argument to me. Noe\u2019s argument opposes \u201csound\u201d to embodied, analog materiality. Recording technologies alienate us from music\u2019s \u201creal\u201d existence as a bodily action and \u201creal\u201d human interaction.<\/p>\n

Noe calls on these \u201cquaint idea[s]\u201d in a way that leads us to think he\u2019s offering them as straw men…but he\u2019s actually using a scientific study to back up these seemingly oversimplified ideas with hard evidence. The rest of the article discusses a psychological study<\/a> (which avanturb problematizes in hir above-cited post) that finds that both laypeople and professional musicians base their judgments of musical quality not on what they hear, but what they see performers do. We\u2019re not listening to music, we\u2019re watching people. Or, as Noe puts it, \u201cWe are interested in ourselves…Not noise.\u201d This distinction between (real) people and (fake) sounds isn\u2019t a misguided prejudice Noe dismisses–it\u2019s the crux of his argument. Music is not sound, but human beings doing things. Sound is somehow the disembodied opposite of bodily performance and relationships.<\/p>\n

Do views like Noe\u2019s, which claim that \u201creal\u201d music is performance, implicitly treat the sonic itself as some sort of \u201cvirtual\u201d world? In other words, is this a digital dualist argument?<\/p>\n

Given the role of electronic\/digital music in his musical ontology, Noe\u2019s argument overlaps with what cyborgologists would call digital dualism. His material\/immaterial dualism often intersects with analog\/digital or bodies\/electronics dualisms. And it\u2019s these dualisms that significantly weaken his argument. I feel like I\u2019m stating the obvious, but this is what Noe\u2019s dualisms lead him to overlook: digital electronics also exist materially, and they exist materially as distinctively digital phenomena. We have bodily relations with digital technology, just as there are bodily, performative, or what musicologists would call \u201cdrastic<\/a>\u201d dimensions to the making of electronic music.* For example, when I DJ, I play digital files on my laptop (using Traktor); I have to practice my sets because I need to physically rehearse what I need to do with my body and when. There\u2019s also muscle memory involved in working audio controllers: you have to get the hang of trackpads, knobs, sliders, sample pads, and keyboards. We also have bodily relations with sound art. Materiality and bodily performance are central features, for example, of Christian Marclay\u2019s scratched and mutilated CDs. This may be digital\/electronic sound art, but the materiality of the sound medium and Marclay\u2019s physical technique (both in preparing the CDs and in playing them) are definitive features of the work.<\/p>\n

Sound is material and embodied–sound is the product of vibrating things, so it can\u2019t exist without materiality. In fact, listening to musical performances is one very informative way of paying attention to what musicians are doing with their bodies. By listening to an oboe player, I can tell things about hir embouchure (how ze\u2019s holding hir mouth), how open or closed hir sinuses and throat are, how relaxed hir shoulders are, what ze\u2019s doing with hir diaphraghm, hir tongue, and, of course, hir fingers. And even though electronic music is generated by speakers and amps, not by human bodies and legacy instruments, it\u2019s also material, and often exploits this materiality for performative effect. Anyone who\u2019s heard bass rattle a car or felt club speakers vibrate their bodies has experienced some of the ways in which electronic music is materially performative.<\/p>\n

If we can only \u201creally\u201d access music when we see it, this sets up a false dualism between sound, which we hear, and bodies, which we see. By treating the oppsoition between sound and performance as a digital dualism, Noe can implicitly posit sound as virtuality–i.e., as having no presence in meatspace. The absent middle is sonic materiality, and the fact that we can and do listen to bodies. Now, it may be correct to say that when judging people\u2019s bodies, we rely more on visual than on auditory perception. However, that\u2019s a very different claim that Noe\u2019s, which is that when judging music we rely more on vision than on audition. Perhaps what the psychological study Noe cites shows us is that when faced with difficult aesthetic judgments of artistic performances, we fall back on our visual appraisals of performer\u2019s bodies?<\/em> So, instead of judging the performance, we\u2019re judging, well, them<\/em>?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Noe is sort of right, but for the wrong reasons:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The study Noe cites only confirms what feminist scholars have known for a long time: we generally filter our judgements of the actual works through judgements of the person performing or creating the artwork. As art historians Roziska Parker and Griselda Pollock put it<\/a>, \u201cthe sex of the artist matters: it conditions the way art is seen and discussed.\u201d For example, creative work by women is often seen as less aesthetically and culturally valuable than creative work by men. We\u2019re more inclined to focus on the art itself when the artist\u2019s body is \u201cnormal\u201d–that is, when it\u2019s a straight white able-bodied cis-male. We\u2019re less inclined to see women and people of color as artists, so we don\u2019t consider their work as \u201cart.\u201d Or, if we do see them as artists, we tend to reduce our interpretations of their work to their biographies, as though they were not capable of imagining or thinking beyond their experiences. Artist and philosopher Adrian Piper talks about this latter point here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The study was correct in noting the tendency to judge people not works, or to judge works through people. But this habit does not tell us anything about the ontology of music–what it is and isn\u2019t. It just tells us that often people say they\u2019re doing one thing–evaluating an artwork–when in fact they\u2019re doing something else–evaluating the person making the artwork.<\/p>\n

We filter our aesthetic judgments of works through our implicit biases about people. This fact suggests an alternate interpretation of the study results. As Noe explains, the study found that<\/p>\n

\n

A group of experts are unable to agree on which snippet of recording is a winning performance. But unanimity is swift and secure when they ignore the music and solely pay attention to the soundless video track.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If all the entrants gave more or less technically perfect performances, judges have to determine the winner based on the musician\u2019s interpretation of the work. Is The Clash\u2019s cover of \u201cI Fought the Law\u201d better than the Dead Kennedy\u2019s? Is Maria Callas\u2019s Carmen better than Jesse Norman\u2019s? Those questions come down to taste. And it\u2019s really hard to get a group of people to unanimously agree on matters of taste. Chacun a son gout<\/em> (to each his own taste) is a cliche for a reason. It\u2019s waaaay easier to get people to come to unanimous agreement in their evaluations of people. As implicit bias research<\/a> (in psychology, no less) has shown, even women are implicitly misogynist, and even people of color are implicitly racist. That\u2019s because these biases are hegemonic–they\u2019re the \u201cruling ideas,\u201d the epistemic norms that all \u201cright-thinking\u201d people in a society share. Unanimity is swift and secure when judges focus on who the musician is and what ze\u2019s doing because, well, patriarchy and white supremacy are more consistent and powerful than musical taste. Judges could quibble for hours about the interpretive details of a performance, but implicit biases put everyone (or, most everyone) on the same page.<\/p>\n

Noe\u2019s claim is not just philosophically and ethnomusicologically problematic,** it\u2019s also politically troublesome. He defines music in a way that naturalizes implicit biases about people within that definition. If music is what people do, then \u201cmusic\u201d is contingent on who counts as a \u201cperson,\u201d and which kinds of people are taken more seriously than other kinds of people. Just because we do judge people instead of works doesn\u2019t mean we should do that. As a female musician and sound artist, I would really rather people focus mainly on my work and not first on my gender or my body…because generally my gender and my body are factors that don\u2019t work in my favor.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the end, I wonder what they payoff to Noe\u2019s argument is. Why is it appealing to reduce music to sight or the visual? Why say visible performance is what music, at bottom, \u201creally\u201d is? Why not treat the relationship between the visual and aural components of music appreciation with more nuance and complexity? Maybe I\u2019m a bit cynical, a bit too inclined to have a bad feeling about this, but it seems like this oversimplification must do some ideological work–that is to say, it must help its proponents ignore inconvenient information that would complicate assumptions they don\u2019t want complicated. That\u2019s usually the case when really smart people make precisely the sort of overly reductive moves that they otherwise can\u2019t be duped into making.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* Since the publication of Abbate\u2019s article (linked above), musicologists have been paying more attention to music as performance. However, in musicology the relevant opposition isn\u2019t performance:sound, but performance:text. Abbate\u2019s advocacy of the performative dimensions of music is mainly a corrective for decades (well, centuries) of text-centrism, of treating music as a \u201cwork\u201d and not also as a practice. These musical texts were generally treated as visual representations of sounds–much in the same way that writing can be thought of as the visual (or graphological, if you want to go Derridian here) representation of speech. So \u201cdrastic\u201d musicology, musicology that focuses on performance, is a different way of paying attention to sounds, not the privileging of the visual over the sonic dimension of performance.<\/p>\n

** In studying the performative aspects of music, ethno\/musicologists have plenty of evidence that, as avanturb put it, \u201cthere are countless of artists and fans who listen to music for the way artists use sound to articulate significance mutually exclusive from the physical means used to produce such sounds. \u00a0This reality is just completely inescapable in 2013 not just from a nerdy niche perspective but even as a reflection of popular music.\u201d People care about sound. Trent Reznor is releasing two different versions of his new album that differ only in the quality of mastering. Back in the 1980s, Andrew Goodwin argued that the distinguishing feature of musical performance was timbre–that is, the quality of a song\u2019s or artist\u2019s \u201csound.\u201d And there\u2019s lots of scholarly literature in black studies that examines the role of sound as such in black cultural production and politics (I\u2019m thinking of Alex Weheliye\u2019s Phonographies, Julian Henriques\u2019s Sonic Bodies, and Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman\u2019s work on race and radio.) I also wonder if Noe has heard of ear training–which are sometimes called \u201cmusicianship\u201d–classes. They\u2019re fundamental components of college music curricula, along with performance studio, theory, and history. Performers don\u2019t just practice \u201cdoing\u201d–they also need to learn how to hear sounds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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or, \u201c\u2018Reality\u2019 is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes\u201d __ I get really nervous when people start making claims about what is and isn\u2019t \u201creal\u201d music. Like Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, \u201cI have a bad feeling about this\u201d because these arguments, like the \u201ccave\u201d the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[851,10447,12741,115,3249,16042],"class_list":["post-16802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-body","tag-digital-dualism","tag-materiality","tag-music","tag-philosophy","tag-sound"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16802"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16842,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16802\/revisions\/16842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}