The Sonorous, the Haptic and the Intensive

In 2015, I attended the Aesthetics After Finitude conference in Sydney, Australia. At that time, I was able to present items of research surrounding themes of synthesis and control as practiced by the Phonoegregore, a hitherto barely-known “sonic cabal” whose activity became audible during Marc Couroux’s seminal presentation at Tuning Speculation in Toronto, 2013. The research I presented came to me via a colleague who has requested total anonymity, and was attributed to M. August Mountweazel, although this is almost certainly a pseudonym. At the time of that conference, some researchers requested further elaboration on the research, probably due to the general paucity of scholarship in this area. Although the folio containing the research was quite thin, it was accompanied with a few notes from the researcher. These appear to be personal in nature, although some of the explicative content indicates that they were intended for a readership of some kind. Although undated, the context suggests that they come from during or immediately before the previously presented research. As before, I cannot vouch for the veracity of any of this writing. However, I’ve chosen to publish these selected writings here in the hope that they will provide some insight into Phonoegregoric methods. Please note that the numbering has been added to these excerpts based on the order in which they were collated: these numerals were not in the original text. Dr. A. Hulbert Sydney, January 2016

Connessioni Remote, 2024

In the 1980s, Napalm Death founded grindcore: a musical subgenre at the crossroads of extreme metal, an-archo-punk and hardcore. The style aimed at sonic extremity interpreted as a wall of sound: an aesthetic stimulated by its working-class origins. Grindcore has subsequently influenced various extreme musical prac-tices that sound the relationship between class and capitalism. From Japanese noise to American jazzcore to British electronic music, the genre’s approach reverberates as a bodily philosophy of audio. By framing this phenomenon of resonance between transnational genres, my aim is to declare them part of a ‘sound-as-physical-assault’continuum, based on extreme/intense aesthetic experiences of sound. Starting from Brar’s notion of ‘mineral interiors’, which describes how the intensity of sound in Afrodiasporic musical currents resonates both a space in the record and in the listener’s world, I suggest that the same theorisation of an intensity-based sound ecology can be applied to grindcore, jazzcore and japanoise as well as genres such as dub and footwork. While both participate in the same paradigm of music based on haptic intensity and class issues, the two concepts are different in terms of political imagination and psychophysical effects of music. This contribution ensures the possibility of highlighting phonic and sociopolitical similarities while maintain-ing differences between musical genealogies that share a maximalist use of sound systems.

Recent studies in the field of sensory archaeology – that encompasses the meaning and impact of senses in the past and in the comprehension of past phenomena – developed new theories and methods in the archaeological research starting from not only visible and tangible data but also envisioning no longer existing (visible, tangible and audible) information from the past. Sensory archaeology, in fact, looks at what we can label an experimental approach to the past and archaeological contexts assuming that the analysis of the perception through the senses can eventually disclose new possibility and attempts for a wider comprehension of the use of material culture, on the one hand, and architecture and landscape, on the other. Recently, the definition of sensescape precisely points to the evaluation of not only the five senses but, more specifically, how the perception through senses affected the cognition of the space around (the peripersonal space) and the system of communication (interrelations with the space, the things and the people within): in this respect, this approach led to new affordances and perspectives on the different degrees of past interactions in the societies of the ancient Near East. Of course, a process of contextualization is necessary: the use of senses must be settled in the past and in a precise archaeological context so that general assumptions and too generic reconstructions can be avoided. Moreover, the evaluation of the senses must go through an emic process that takes into account the perspective and meaning that are given by the society under examination: the risk of flattening the sensory experience of the past on our modern perception and evaluation of the use and impact of senses is always round the corner. In this respect, does a classification of senses exist? Based on contemporary society and forced by the nature of the archaeological evidence, it might be logic to give the sight the first rank of the classification. Does the result also reflect the reality of the past? Can we in fact infer that sight was the most exploited sense by the ancient societies in the Near East? It seems to me that since we still see the ruins of landscape, cities and buildings we are inevitably forced to cope with the sight assuming that what we see might in fact corresponds to what ancient people saw or, conversely, that what we no longer see was once clearly visible to the ancient people. The present paper analyses the effect of sound speaking against the tyranny of sight in archaeological contexts: cities and architecture are not only spaces that can be seen but they also resound and this very specific quality will be presented starting from the example of the Temple of the Rock at Ebla. In particular, starting from the definition of “acoustemology” by Steven Fold, the present communication will try to disclose the knowledge of ancient space and architecture though and via the sonic quality of the environment and materiality of things and objects – where also people become in the end auditory elements of what we can label a soundscape. Recent studies of ancient acoustic places will be taken into consideration in the introduction to settle the field of the research and the methodology of investigation, whereas the systems of acoustic resonance will be investigated to point out the role and importance of the sound in the perception and as a cognitive instrument for the communication and shared participation of individual: it is time to give the past an ear, going beyond the exclusivity of the eye showing how sound (not exclusively music, but even the noise) affects the process of interactions and the construction of the self socially, in relations to the others and the neighbouring (un)built space.

Materials used to make musical instruments or sound objects are essential in Archaeomusicological studies. They allow us to assess the acoustic capacities of artefacts and to reconstruct the soundscapes of Antiquity. Bronze (and more generally metals), but also wood or terracotta have their own logic, and they raise a set of questions (conservation, restoration, lifespan, sound range).

Reviews by Robert Lapsley on Zupancic, Simon Harvey on Heller-Roazen, Jamie Hakim on Pitcher, Katherine Harrison on visual culture, Felicia Chan on Cosmopolitanism

Paper to be presented at the RAI2018: Art, Materiality and Representation Conference, Panel P040 "Art and Material Culture in Prehistoric Europe" organised by Chris Gosden and John Robb. Royal Anthropological Institute. London. 1-3 June 2018. ABSTRACT - It has been claimed that a holistic approach to landscape history is needed, for the separation between the economic, the cultural and the cosmological did not exist in the pre-modern past. Yet, there are places in the landscape that seem to indicate that the holistic approach needs nuancing. One such type of places is prehistoric rock art sites in Europe. They can be seen as locales where prehistoric people incorporated sensory experience as a form of cosmological knowledge. To their lack of apparent functional use, and the high degree of symbolism of the depictions produced in them, we can add their peculiar sonorous nature. In the last few years we have undertaken a series of systematic acoustics measurements in a number of rock art landscapes in Mediterranean Europe. Results have pointed to the selection of places with the best acoustic properties in their area, although there are nuances from one area to another implying agency and transformation. Anthropologists have noted that sound and music are systematically present in ritual (even if in the form of silence) and it is our contention that sound contributed to the understanding of the sacred at rock art sites and to the understanding of ensouled landscapes by the hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies that produced the art. In this paper we will discuss these ideas providing new, specific examples derived from our work in archaeoacoustics.

The purpose of this article is to present a brief review of the applications of the author's research on Pre-Columbian sonorities in the composition of several works for fixed media and acoustic instruments. Through the introduction of three selected works composed during the last fifteen years, relevant methodological and ontological aspects

The cultural and the scientific history of the bell sound are linked together, and thereby the methodological premises are created to analyze cultural phenomena in terms of signal analysis. Because of the strange phenomenon that the tone after which a bell is named, the so-called strike note, cannot be found within the spectrum of the bell, the sound of a church bell can be described as the deconstruction of Western acoustic culture. In its sound the secondary precedes the primary. The primary—the fundamental tone—is projected fi rst of all by the secondary, its harmonics. This article, which introduces (to a modest extent) media-theoretical and Lacanian terminology into the history of science discourse, argues that bells represent and signal a state of emergency in the symbolic order because they are this state of emergency in the acoustical real.

Archaeoacoustics refers to the field of study concerned with the effects of sound in past societies. Scholars interested in acoustics try to understand the human past beyond its materiality by recovering a set of less evident, less tangible cultural signs relating to the sense of hearing. Of the many contexts in which the intangible evidence of acoustics can be analysed, this paper pays attention to its expression in rock art. Our aim is to explore the quantitative analyses undertaken for the study of acoustics in rock art landscapes by focusing on the three main lines of evidence that rock art researchers are following: (i) landscapes with special naturally occurring sounds; (ii) lithophones, ringing rock, and rock gongs; (iii) intentionally produced sound. Three acoustic effects have been usually subjected to quantitative measurement: echoes, resonance, and reverberation. We will argue that not all lines of evidence have been explored in equal measure by scholars and that there are specific types of acoustic measurements and analysis, the potential of which are still to be assessed. Keywords: Archaeoacoustics, Rock art, Quantitative analysis, Post-Palaeolithic, Soundscape

Reviews by Daniela Caselli on childhood, Tara Blake Wilson on Albert Kahn, Annebella Pollen on Sarvas and Frohlich on snapshots, Bart Moorre-Gilbert on Robert Spencer; and Jeff Geiger on documentary film