{"id":20176,"date":"2015-07-09T06:00:42","date_gmt":"2015-07-09T10:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=20176"},"modified":"2015-07-09T06:34:13","modified_gmt":"2015-07-09T10:34:13","slug":"music-as-predictive-science-attali-music-the-science-of-forecasting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2015\/07\/09\/music-as-predictive-science-attali-music-the-science-of-forecasting\/","title":{"rendered":"“Music as Predictive Science”: Attali, music, & the science of forecasting"},"content":{"rendered":"

For as influential as Attali\u2019s Noise<\/em> has been, most scholars have sidestepped its central claim: \u201cmusic is prophecy\u201d (11). It feels really undersupported; Attali asserts that music anticipates or foreshadows social change, but he doesn\u2019t seem to provide anything more solid than correlations as evidence. As Eric Drott says in his just-published article in Critical Inquiry<\/em>, \u201cthe book never fully spells out the mechanisms by which music performs its prophetic function\u201d (725). I think Attali does<\/i> spell out this mechanism. Music is prophecy because its physical structure–sound waves–is isomorphic with the physical structure of economic forecasts (probability functions, which are graphed as sine curves). Attali thinks both music and statistical forecasts are made of the same stuff, so thus music is predictive<\/i> in the sense that Amazon\u2019s recommendation bot is predictive.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been revising this article on Noise, Foucault, & biopolitical neoliberalism<\/a> for my next book project. My analysis focuses on the Attali\u2019s claim that the logic of the market, as understood by 1970s macroeconomic theory, is isomorphic with the logic of sound waves. Macroeconomics and acoustics study, essentially, the same phenomena. As Attali puts it, \u2018non-harmonic music\u2019 (Noise 115) makes \u2018the laws of acoustics. . . the mode of production of a new sound matter\u2019, and in so doing, \u2018displays all of the characteristics of the technocracy managing the great machines of the repetitive economy\u2019 (113). The laws of acoustics are isomorphic with the \u00a0\u201crules\u201d of biopolitical governmentality and financialized political economy–that is, with statistical forecasts. The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics\u201d to understand and manage populations \u201cinclude forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures\u201d (SMBD 246). Similarly, the methods economists use to understand the \u201crepetitive\u201d (Attali\u2019s term for late capitalism) market include \u201cmacrostatistical and global, aleatory view, in terms of probabilities and statistical groups\u201d (Attali, Social Text, 11). The logic of forecasting and financialization mimics the logic of auditory signals (at least as contemporary physics understands this latter logic)–for example, both probability functions and sound frequencies are visualized as sine waves. Just as harmonics emerge from dynamically interacting frequencies, predictable, reliable \u2018signal\u2019 emerges–as life, as human capital, as a data forecast, a data self–from dynamically interacting streams of data.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So, because he thinks sound and statistical forecasts are more or less identical in structure, Attali can then argue that music is predictive<\/b>, that \u201cour music fortells our future\u201d (Noise 11). Writing in 1977, Attali lacks databases and fast, massive-scale distributed computer processing, so\u00a0uses music, which, like big-data number crunching, \u201cexplores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code\u201d (Noise 11). Music, for Attali, is like an algorithm predicts where society will go next: it crunches all the variables and figures out which combination is most probable. Writing in 2014, Attali further explains that this ability to crunch variables and determine the most probable outcome is what makes music similar to finance: \u201cWe could also explore the reason why music could be seen as predictive: as an immaterial activity, it explores more rapidly than any other the realm of potentials. In that sense, it is not far from another quasi immaterial activity, finance, which is also very often an excellent predictive tool.\u201d In 2014, Attali gave a lecture titled \u201cMusic As A Predictive Science\u201d at Harvard. There, he talks about Noise, his intentions in writing it, and whether his claims about the future were accurate. He repeatedly refers to his project in Noise<\/i> as \u201cforecasting.\u201d Forecasting is the same term Nate Silver uses to describe what big data analytics does. In a sense, Attali scooped Silver by more than 30 years; Noise <\/i>uses music in the same way that The Signal And The Noise<\/i> uses data.
\nThis is widely (and rightly) taken to be the point where Noise<\/i> jumps the shark into pseudo-rationality: music seems no better suited to predict the future than astrology is. But data forecasting is also<\/i> pseudo-rational<\/a>. Attali\u2019s method seems obviously outlandish because it, unlike big data forecasting, can\u2019t hide behind the mantle of scientific objectivity. Privileging noise, understanding music as a market that is predictable and whose future can be forecast, Attali\u2019s analysis of the history of western art music employs some of the central principles of neoliberal economic theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For as influential as Attali\u2019s Noise has been, most scholars have sidestepped its central claim: \u201cmusic is prophecy\u201d (11). It feels really undersupported; Attali asserts that music anticipates or foreshadows social change, but he doesn\u2019t seem to provide anything more solid than correlations as evidence. As Eric Drott says in his just-published article in Critical […]<\/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":[],"class_list":["post-20176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20176","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=20176"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20184,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20176\/revisions\/20184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}