Groovology and the Magic of Other People's Music

Etnomusikologian vuosikirja, 1998

2021

For a long time, philosophers and social theorists have discussed how things remain the same (from Plato to Bourdieu) and how they are always different (from Heraclitus to Deleuze). In this chapter, I would like to consider the question of whether two things can be simultaneously the same and different. Say two people download a song, in MP3 format, from a website on the internet; do they end up with the same recording on their respective devices, or are these different files? Short answer: yes. 1 My interest for this broad questioning, well beyond the scope of sound studies, relates to a research project that I conducted a few years ago on electronic music in China (Zimmermann 2006, 2015). A former student at the Music Conservatory in Geneva, Switzerland, I was originally trained in electroacoustic music, with courses including sound engineering, computer programming, history of audio techniques, algorithmic composition, and more. During my studies, teachers and students from our school relied on the perspective of physics of sound and applied science. I remember that while music itself, as art, was often difficult to seize in concrete terms, we didn't learn or discuss anything particularly mysterious about the production of sound. On the contrary, the theoretical frameworks to which we were initiated made concrete sense, and their application was clear. Consequently, when I later decided to focus on the practices of Chinese electronic musicians as part of my PhD thesis in sinology at the University of Geneva, I felt that I had a solid technical grasp. The musicians in Beijing were playing vinyl records, editing audio files, or relying on 1 This introductory paragraph is shamelessly inspired by Jonathan Sterne's paper title "Media or Instruments? Yes" (2007).

Organised Sound, 2008

Most research and academic writing about electronic and electroacoustic music is focused on music produced within academic communities-an inward-looking dynamic. The theme of Organised Sound 13(1) was established to explore work that exists outside this domain, work not supported by the academic economy. What is this work? From 1994, a body of works emerged, Oval's Systemisch (1994, Thrill Jockey/Mille Plateaux), Ikeda's +/2 (1996, Touch) and Autechre's Grantz Graf (2002, Warp) to identify a few. These heralded new aesthetic approaches to experimental music, new formations of technologies, and more. 'Electronica', 'post-digital', 'microsound', 'glitch', or one of many other descriptions of sub-genres have been proposed, used, defined and redefined to quantify the field. Yet all these classifications for new approaches to computer music are problematic in some respect; many are misrepresentations or, in fact, meaningless terms, often revealing more about authors' intentions than their subject. Not surprisingly, many of the leading

Modernism is a Western philosophical movement informed by a Western pedagogical and historical perspective. It excludes most of the world’s music; modernism is followed by more modernism, not by postmodernism. Musical Post Modernism is the armlock that the creative world as a whole has used to subdue positivist and modernist alike, so that it might politely remind the western conservatory that the rest of the world makes valuable and intertextual music too, and always has.

2010

Found sound' has become a more prominent element in electronic dance music in recent years. Artists such as Mum, Fourtet, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert and Boards of Canada include elements from the world of 'found sound' into their music, either as full sound art compositions or minute gradients of field recordings incorporated into more rhythmic based tracks. This leads to a blurring of genres and sound worlds; however, an interesting anomaly is that while these artists seem to embrace this blurring of genres, it is my belief that the same cannot be said for the more academic side of sonic art. Within academic institutes who cater for the sonic arts, the influence of electronic dance music is not always noticeable. An instrument which seems to have transcended genre is the turntable. It is now accessible in both the world of sonic art and electronic music culture. But how is this so? What I intend to look at in this paper is why this dichotomy of sound worlds exists, concluding with a look at how the turntable could act as an intrinsic element of performance and composition but also as a milestone instrument in the fusing of genres and cultures.

Popular Music, 2009

Even though electronic and computer-based technologies are commonly used in music composition, performance and recording, this field of technology use has, with a few exceptions, remained fairly unexplored within social studies of technology. In this article, the role of technology in music production is investigated by applying the notion of script (Akrich 1992) to an empirical study of users of the Roland MC303 Groovebox, a self-contained instrument for making techno, rap, jungle, hip-hop, acid and other styles of electronic (dance) music. The study focuses especially on individual differences between users' perceptions of the musical-stylistic directedness of the Groovebox and how they construct different user scripts and more advanced needs as they become more familiar with the instrument. The latter observation highlights the relevance of a user trajectory, the notion that enthusiast technology users may keep on using a specific technological artefact through various usage modes or scripts over time.

Introduction The paradigm of research allows us to approach a common discourse at gatherings such as this conference. The effects of the music-making energy that motivates us appear on a continuum from pure sound to abstract questions. Each musical decision produces at least dozen such lines of enquiry, and one reason we gather together is that our particular means of production brings to the surface technical questions that demand technical answers. In this paper I shall look at some technical issues – musical, aesthetic, computational – but my real point is broader and more presumptuous. The various practices of improvising with technology have grown up defining themselves against existing cultural structures; they are not the production of scores, they are not jazz, they challenge mechanical reproduction, take their electroacoustic care over every sample and are then willing to do violence to it should musical truth demand, they argue with ownership, they even try to escape from music into other media or modes of performance at every opportunity. The real badge is of course to have a piece of custom performance kit – generally unreproduced if not unreproducible (a generalisation, but the image is not uncommon). The main point is that the mode of performance tends not to afford participation in a particular practice; it is overtly individualised. I caricature, but there is a degree of self-caricaturing in the practice. I hope to show that rather than being in any way alternative, such a mode of music-making represents a central paradigm of musical activity and understanding. This paper will therefore suggest: • That the interactive improvised work might be acknowledged as a central cultural paradigm – but to do that we need to understand what kind of thing it might be • That to do that we need to sophisticate our understanding of how such activity is distributed through time and space • That in particular we need to see where knowledge arises and how we recognise it • That because technology requires us to be explicit, we need to consider the mechanisms for self-knowledge Definitions What music is at issue here? Lets start by spreading the net too wide: technological not as in plugged-in, amplified or processed but as in a sound surface made possible by technology – and it is only just too far to think of the phonographic listening of Mahler or the additive orchestration of Ravel. Here we're talking about technology that transforms time and memory, causality, the scope of physical and imaginative intentionality. Improvised not as in the arbitrary, the mechanistic or the therapeutic – but in the meaningful determining of the direction of a musical argument during performance. Interactive is the not unproblematic term often used. What kind of work are we dealing with? These questions relate to properties common to all musical 'texts', from Guido to Miles or Karlheinz: the mode, locus and moment of inscription. What modes of inscription are proper to our historical situation? (Score-following, for example, may well turn out to be a non-problem of transition.) How then can we characterise works that characterise themselves by their lack of definition on one hand and individuality on the other? Models for the work – locus and moment Works for performance can be 'thick' or 'thin' in their constitutive properties. If it is thick, the work's determinative properties are comparatively few in number and most of the qualities of a performance are aspects of the performer's interpretation, not of the work as such. The thinner they are, the thinner is the performer to control aspects of the performance. … if the work is thick, a great many of the properties heard in a performance are crucial to its identity and must be reproduced in a fully faithful rendition of the work. The thicker the work, the more the composer controls the sonic detail of its accurate instances. (Davies 2001, 20) Now of course deriving a default model of composition from the status of the nineteenth century score is like understanding architecture on the basis of the pyramids. Tape music offered an alternative pyramid, one that can be erected by one man – an inflatable. But to extend a human-geographical metaphor they cast a long shadow, and it may be us, the peasants trying to work out a means for survival in the noisy musical third world suburbs that can offer an alternative – but to be culturally useful it needs to understand itself better. Recently working on a survey chapter on the psychology of composition I continuously assumed I was missing something – in fact there's precious little of relevance. Sloboda (1985, 118) proposes a model of the process which has validity but looks something like an optimisation algorithm for the solution of a creative problem using available technical means. What is interesting is the way it passes in and out of consciousness. We might define this process thus: Composition is a reflexive, iterative process of inscription. The work, once identified as such and externalisable to some degree, passes circularly between inner and outer states. It passes through internal and external representations – mostly

Toward a Sound Ecology, 2020

Ethnomusicology is the study of people making music. People make sounds that are recognized as music, and people also make “music” into a cultural domain. This 1989 conference paper defined ethnomusicology and contrasted music as a contingent cultural category with earlier scientific definitions that essentialized music as an object. It was published for the first time in Musicology Annual (2015). Here it is as reprinted, with a new introduction, in my book Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays (Indiana University Press, 2020). The book is available from IU Press, the usual online sources, and your favorite independent bookstore.

The 20th century will be remembered as a time where the domain of music has undergone some changes doomed to reshape it in a radical way. In fact, it was exactly during this century that the concept of music itself collapsed. If until then music was defined in opposition against what was considered non-music , the last century witnessed a tendency towards an all inclusive-process of assimilation of all kind of sound into music : noises, silences, non-intentional sounds, were all progressively accepted inside the musical domain- a domain that was stretched to the point that its meaning was getting closer and closer to that of the broader field of sound . At the same time, technology had developed at incredible speed, being one of the main contributors to that radical process of sound expansion: "Radio, recording and new instruments (...) all challenge the borders of the soundworld and of music" . Recording, in particular, played a pivotal role: "Recording was the crucial technological advance which liberated a concern with sound as sound- never before could one analyse sounds and alter their envelope" . The advancements in technologies have created new instruments, new musical genres and new techniques, affecting both the music itself, as well as the way in which music circulates, is produced and distributed : "the transition from artisanal to industrial production transforms not only the technology of distribution but also that which is distributed" . It was during the 20th century that the concept of mass culture took shape in the way we know it, leading to a situation in which music is sold as any other kind of commodity. That situation generated a fertile and on-going debate on the relationship that exists between art, interpreted as a sphere autonomous from society whose products were supposed to be created for their own sake, and popular, understood as mass, culture, a domain that is instead inherently social, whose products are created to please consumers. The main focus of my research will be exactly the tension existing between the spheres of art and pop as mass culture, a problem that has to be analysed on the backdrop of the frame that I have sketched above. What I would like to show is the fact that due to the impact of technology on both of these domains, art and pop are not just two opposite poles, but are entangled in a continuous dialogue. These dynamics have become even stronger since so-called postmodernism, when the boundaries between high and low culture have been progressively dismantled, and the production of culture has become inextricable from market questions. I will try to make an account of these processes, seeing them according to different angles and contexts. My strategy will be to do so taking as example the case of glitch music, and dividing my research in three different parts according to the different perspective that I am going to take into account. A 'glitch' is, literally, "the sound of a digital 'mistake' that occurs through the mistranslation or deterioration of digital data" , a "digital tick caused by lost or incorrect binary code" . For the time being, we might describe glitch in a very generic way as a genre that makes use of digital mistakes as its musical material. I decided to choose this musical genre because, being emerged at the end of the 20th century, it seemed to me that it had a kind of inherent ability to embody a vast set of issues caught within the frame that I have sketched before. A first cue of that ability is the fact that glitch music is often referred to with a variety of different names: laptop music , independent microsound , art-techno are just some of the names used to refer, more or less, to the same group of artists or musical current. I suppose that this proliferation of different names depends from the kind of issues that every author wants to highlight. For what concerns my research, I would use simply the term glitch, because in my opinion the feature that is worth emphasising is the use of a digital noise as raw material for music, because that feature calls into question issues concerning the impact of technology on music. In addition, noise has often been associated with the more bleeding edge musical fringes; consequently, another topic that will be called into question will be exactly the problem of the relationship between art and pop music. As I have anticipated earlier, I will divide my essay in three sections, each one devoted to the analysis of the tension between art and pop from three different angles. This strategy will allow me to have a broader perspective on the problem, seeing how this is inflected according to different spheres. In the first part I will make a general account of glitch music, discussing its origin and the different influences that have merged into this genre. My aim is not to show simply that glitch music is a genre born from the merging together of elements coming from a popular milieu with ones coming from an experimental one, but to highlight how these two fields have become, through the 20th century, deeply intermingled one with the other. In addition, I will discuss briefly the question of the influence of technology on music, being that this latter problem is highly connected with the question of the bouncing between art and pop, and being that glitch music is a genre dependent on technology as any other before it. In the second section I will give a closer look to the way in which the problem of art and pop articulates in relation with the work of a single artist. The artist that I decided to focus on is Carsten Nicolai, considered according to several accounts as one of the most representative glitch-master. His case is particularly interesting to take into account because, apart from being well known as a musician, he is also a renowned visual artist of international fame. Nicolai is a figure strongly committed with a more established art milieu: he participated in international art exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta, and had several solo exhibitions in art galleries . Nicolai has the ability to accommodate several identities, as it might be understood from the adoption of different monikers according to the different roles that he interprets: as a visual artist, he is known with his given name, Carsten Nicolai, Alva Noto is the moniker that he uses for his most pop-oriented musical production, and simply Noto is the one for the most experimental musical outcomes. In addition, he counts several collaborations with other artists , as, for instance, the one with Japanese pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Cyclo project with Ryoji Ikeda, and collaborations with Mika Vainio from Pan Sonic and Blixa Bargeld. In spite of the nominal separation of the different roles, Nicolai's various identities continually overlap and intersect one another, as it happens with the aural and visual element in his work. Martin Pesch, in his article on the work of this German artist, highlights how his strategic approach has the ability to link together club, art-galleries, avant-garde, techno and design . Despite his commitment with the art establishment, with projects such as the one under the moniker Alva Noto Nicolai oversteps the boundaries of the gallery to drip into clubs and music festivals. My attempt will be to show, taking into account the way in which he talks about his music, how Nicolai's takes elements form both the art and the pop side, and how these elements interact. It is thanks to one of the identities of Carsten Nicolai that I can introduce the discourse that I will take into account in the third section of my research. Carsten Nicolai runs, together with his friends Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider, its own independent record label, Raster-Noton, one of the leading labels for what concern the production of glitch music, minimal techno and experimental electronic music. Nicolai's role as entrepreneur allows me to take into account the question of music commodification. The music market is a particularly interesting environment to consider, as it is within this domain that practical problems relating to the tension between art and pop come into play. It is also the field in which practices and strategies are operating, and the analysis of those might supply some example of how this relationship between art and pop is articulated in practical terms. Through these three different levels of analysis, I want to highlight how art and pop are not to be seen as merely contrasting poles, but rather as two extremities that continually dialogue with one another. The dialogue has been made possible in the 20th century thanks to the strong commitments that both these domains have with technology.

2019