Bodily Expression in Electronic Music

Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity

Deniz Peters, Gerhard Eckel, Andreas Dorschel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136504877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In this book, scholars and artists explore the relation between electronic music and bodily expression from perspectives including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, dance and interactive performance arts, sociology, computer music and sonic arts, and music theory, transgressing disciplinary boundaries and established beliefs. The historic decoupling of action and sound generation might be seen to have distorted or even effaced the expressive body, with the retention of performance qualities via recoupling not equally retaining bodily expressivity. When, where, and what is the body expressed in electronic music then? The authors of this book reveal composers', performers', improvisers' and listeners' bodies, as well as the works' and technologies' figurative bodies as a rich source of expressive articulation. Bringing together humanities' scholarship and musical arts contingent upon new media, the contributors offer inspiring thought and critical reflection for all those seriously engaged with the aesthetics of electronic music, interactive performance, and the body's role in aesthetic experience and expression. Performativity is not only seen as being reclaimed in live electronic music, interactive arts, and installations; it is also exposed as embodied in the music and the listeners themselves.

Part I

Bodily …

1 Touch: Real, Apparent, and Absent

On Bodily Expression in Electronic Music

Deniz Peters

To make a sound—be it with one’s body, or with a traditional instrument—retains a direct, visible, audible, and tactile link between the human making it and the temporal, timbral, and spatial organisation of the sound made. In listening to sounds made and organised in this bodily way, a listener, even if not directly involved in the making herself, partakes in this game of contact, articulation, and withdrawal. One facet of the game is that one can hear something of the human making the sound in the sound, or, to appeal to Roland Barthes’s frequently quoted notion of ‘grain’: one can hear the musician’s body in the music.¹

The link by virtue of which the musician’s body can be heard is, by some, thought of as irrelevant to, or even in the way of, the process of listening to music. To Roger Scruton, we would not yet be listening to music, but merely to a sequence of sounds, if we listened to an implied body. Instead, in listening “with understanding”, the body is abandoned:

It is as though human movements were lifted free from the bodies in which they originate and released into tonal space, there to achieve a togetherness beyond anything that could qualify our bodily life.²

In emphatically shutting out source-related bodily associations of players and instruments alike, Scruton’s abstraction from the body amounts to a disembodied listening. Scruton views the knowledge we have of what is ultimately the performativity of traditional music as a hindrance to the reception of its expression; in what he calls ‘acousmatic experience’, music ideally remains opaque to us in terms of how its sounds are made, as do the speaker’s facial and gestural expressions in the case of the Pythagorean students (akousmatikoi) listening to their teacher speaking from behind a veil.³ In a sort of undoing of the Barthesian ‘grain’, and of the instrumental qualities of the sources of sounds, Scruton’s view requires us to remain oblivious as to—primarily the visuality, but in sum the materiality of—the act of musical production.

Any such hindrance should disappear, or so one might think, where there are no longer players or instruments in the traditional sense, as is the case in much electronic music.⁴ The abstraction from sources and playing beings Scruton takes as essential to the listening experience is implicit to music played using machines, with its sounds being generated algorithmically or as a result of sampling, or in a combination of both. Even in electronic music involving live performance, the heard qualities are physically unbound from the performers’ actions, and the link’s composition may often escape even the informed listener. Electronic music could thus, in Pierre Schaeffer’s but also even in Scruton’s sense, be thought of as paradigmatically acousmatic—its corporeality being opaque or even nonexistent to the listener, without the need for an abstraction from its live production (as there may be none). With no body to abstract from, neither on the side of production, nor on the side of listening, is such music perhaps simply one without bodily expression—that is, inevitably disembodied?

The answer I shall support in this chapter is ‘no’. If by ‘disembodiment’ one understands the undoing of the spatial, temporal, and qualitative ties between maker of sound and occurring sound—as when a sampled female voice is injected at the DJ’s will into the fabric of some house or trance music, or as in Luc Ferrari’s Presque rien avec filles and other anecdotal music—I shall argue there is nevertheless a residue of bodily presence in the sounds we hear, both on the side of the sound and its organisation as chosen for a piece, and on the side of the listening experience. One might think that such a residue is precisely only that, an imprint, a pale trace of the full presence given when the maker is physically there. But I think there is reason to doubt this. Even in the presence of the physical making of organised sounds in performance, what we hear becomes expressive presence only via our bodily experience in listening. Unless what we hear is shaped in a bodily prefigured way, and unless this is heard in the sounds and their organisation, the music will not become palpable to us, as I shall explore throughout this chapter. My thesis is that despite the often noted “disruption”⁵ of bodily sound-making in music using electronic media, and despite listening attitudes and theories that construe listening as disembodied, there is much more bodily presence in what we hear when we hear music than hitherto acknowledged, and that, in terms of aesthetic perception, it may even be omnipresent. I argue that our listening experience is embodied not as a consequence of the Barthesian ‘grain’, but as a consequence of active perception (enabling the experience of grain). What I here discuss in terms of bodily presence and the appearance of touch is at work even in aesthetics rejecting such material or sensual ties.⁶ The idea I shall expand on in what follows is that, behind metaphorical ascriptions of organised sounds as gestural or in other bodily terms,⁷ there is a literal aspect, grounded in the act of perception understood as a bodily act. The literality of these ascriptions, in other words, lies in their proprioceptivity (including tactility), and emerges from bodily knowledge. Bodily expression, as a consequence of this view, can be seen as an issue electronic music (like other contemporary and traditional musics) is deeply suffused with. Its understanding may, for instance in addressing tactility as a component of sonic organisation and character, help to shed light on intersubjective aspects of our aesthetic experience of specific works or performances. The result is a diversified view: touch—occurring during sonic articulation via bodily expression and, as a feeling of touching or being touched, in the listener’s proprioceptivity—can be absent or present, and in its presence apparent or real, in electronic music. Electronic music becomes an interrogation of human presence or absence by the very difficulty that composing this presence in fact entails.

LOCATING TOUCH IN BODILY EXPRESSION

In music played on traditional instruments, touch forms a subtle part of a performance. It is present in the performers’ literal tactility on the instrument, which we are so used to viewing as a kind of sound-generating labour that we might be misled to deem the nuanced skin contact here as aesthetically irrelevant. Upon listening with our eyes closed we might drift into believing that the sounds are there for themselves, ‘pure’ sounds, leading an independent existence from the wordly labour or play of performance, making performance transparent. Thinking that we appreciate what we hear without an interest in how it is made, we might overlook that we are blocking out the makers, and the conditions of making.⁸ We might then even be led to think of the making as obtrusive to musical experience (see Scruton’s point as discussed above). But, in so doing, we bracket something this literal tactility also provides: there are aspects of bodily presence that go beyond the obvious given that performers literally touch the instruments to make sounds: (1) we hear musical gestures other than the performers’ individual and idiomatic playing gestures in the latter, something that would cease if the latter were not organised through the medium of the body; (2) we can be ‘touched’ by music and experience musical chills;⁹ (3) there is a hue of haptic experience: music can be and has been described in terms of texture, physiognomy,¹⁰ tactility, and breathing, either in bodily terms (as if it had a body), or in terms of visceral experience (as felt in the body);¹¹ and (4) even when sounds from various sources blend (as in harmony) or fuse sequentially (as in Klangfarbenmelodie), this might be seen as a form of touch outside what is literally done by performers. These four forms of touch do not take place between players and instruments; they name invisible meetings of bodily presences, with bodies being those of listeners, of the music, and of the sound vibrations and instruments’ sonic identities. But despite the figurative description, some of what we experience when we are literally being touched does reside there somehow, and with this the intentionality implied in touch as a psychologically coloured act of contact.

The presence of touch just described eventuates between two materialities: next to the physicality of performance, the listening experience introduces a second, invisible materiality, a second tactility, in its being grounded in the body—not only in the bodies of others, as they make the sounds, but also, importantly, in our own bodies. What we hear is, by physical necessity, the sound of contact and excitation; and we have embodied knowledge of the making of such contact to effect such sounds. Even without knowing how these sounds and sound sequences were made in terms of instrumental playing technique, we may hear them as touch (quite aside from a comparative listening to their structural organisation).

This second tactility—a tactility experienced through the sound and from the body—is given to all listeners as part of their bodily experience, and, if sufficiently so, it can enable mutual empathy. It can amount to an invisible yet palpable bodily presence in the music which, given the awareness, may be anticipated, arranged, and apprehended. Hearing (from) the body means to hear crudeness and its overcoming; identity in the unified range of its patterns (affected by anatomy); intimacy in the skin-tight proximity of haptic sensation and the familiarity with one’s own bodily realm of being—that is, shared existential givens; via this, stamina and endurance, in the knowledge of efforts behind articulate tactility; believed physical limits and their virtuosic transcension; gender and self, via significant habits and their individual constellation and dissolution as achieved in different works; and memory and discipline, in the ability to repeat and to recognise repetition. In sum: tactility speaks of specificities and agglomerations of the enumerated qualities making up bodily expression.¹² I regard this as a crucial condition for our ability to grasp music at large, which, as I shall presently argue, includes our ability to grasp electronic music.

All that can be heard as touch-related in the above sense has two perceptive components: a heard component, and a felt component. The meaning of ‘felt’ or ‘feeling’ in the present context is not to be confused with that of ‘emotion’, nor does it necessarily include a judgement of like or dislike. Rather, it concerns the listener’s proprioception—that is, the feeling of one’s bodily extension.¹³ Proprioception, unlike sensation as caused by skin contact, is an awareness of the body, as it is sustained without direct haptic stimulation. The second tactility I spoke of is, in this sense, one felt proprioceptively.

This claim affords further explanation. Before I do so, the issue of an intermodal perceptive phenomenon as part of the listening experience needs further clarification. It is widely acknowledged that the experience of music transcends the hearing of sounds as mere sounds. We hear motion and action, gestures and personal expression in music.¹⁴ The underlying notion of hearing in is widespread amongst music philosophers. Roughly, the idea is that there is an affiliation of mental states with musical processes, thought of as given in hearing in as if there were some immediate correspondence between some motion in music—a motion thought ideal—and the recognition or even experience of, for instance, emotional and other psychological states. Even the most sophisticated conceptions of this interrelation, as for instance Jerrold Levinson’s concept of persona, however, fall short of closing the gap in our comprehension of how hearing a specific instance of motion in music goes into our hearing a specific instance of personal expression in it; no doubt that we can experience this, but how does the latter arise from the former qualitatively?

Paul Boghossian is one of the authors to notice this explanatory shortcoming in Roger Scruton’s conception of double intentionality.¹⁵ In a nutshell, Scruton conceives of the experience of music as music (as opposed to mere sound sequences) as given in a double bind between a world of sound and a metaphorical world of tones, strangely uniting hearing in with the heard like a change of aspect. Boghossian rightly raises that the grounds of the metaphorical experience at the basis of a hearing in so conceived remain inexplicable. How come we are able to hear specific sound sequences as these specific personal expressions of mental states, in a non-arbitrary way, granted that we do this? Levinson’s argument stops at a similar point as Scruton’s: the abstract musical persona’s gestures somehow have a literal aspect, and we recognise and experience personal expression through these; but any talk of musical gestures is metaphorical. What links one with the other?

A way out of this dilemma appears via a less noted perceptive intermodality that extends hearing in: musical experience includes a felt dimension. The idea of such a felt dimension is gaining recognition in recent years. For example, Andy Hamilton, in his Aesthetics and Music, speaks of the felt correlation between rhythmically organised sound and bodily rhythm.¹⁶ Andrew Mead, in his ‘Bodily Hearing’ (1999), and Arnie Cox, in his ‘Hearing, Feeling, Grasping Gestures’ (2006), speak of a viscerality in musical experience.¹⁷ Cox bases his “mimetic hypothesis”—where a listener supposedly mirrors the performer’s excitation—mainly on subvocal imitation—that is, a silent vocal mimicking. David Burrows, in his Time and the Warm Body (2009), speaks about implicit tactility and bodily aspects of listening to timbre, texture, and voice.¹⁸ These authors all hint at musical experience as being grounded in the body. But, as before, it remains obscure ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Bodily …
• Part II … Expression in …
• Part III … Electronic Music
• List of Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index