Brecht on radio

"As for the radio's object, I don't think it can consist simply in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back cosiness to the home and making family life bearable again. But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers."

undrFM presents:

Borderlands, a weekly radio show exploring the outer reaches of recorded sound - experimental music, electro-acoustic composition, phonography and radiophonic art - begins this Tuesday morning at 1am (6am GMT) on CHRY. The centre piece of the inaugural show will be an oft forgotten masterpiece of popular modernism: Glen Gould’s radio documentary The Latecomers.

As the weeks go by I'll be using this blog as a respository and archive for the shows.

‘Sound comes to the rescue of thought…’ But thought must reluctantly return the favour: some more reading notes on Sonic Warfare

At the core of the book lies a univocal ontology that undermines much extant theorising on sound. The principal claim is that all entities are composed of vibration - to not vibrate is to not exist. Stability occurs only at the level of perception, beneath perception, at the molecular and sub molecular level, matter is in constant flux and this flux is rhythmical.

Vibration, rhythm, concepts traditionally associated with the study of sound are here re-purposed and employed in ontological argument. I’m going to concentrate on a specific consequence of this re-deployment namely the repercussions for any metaphysics of sound (understood here as any theory attempting to grasp what those specific, audible vibrations, we call sound are). For Goodman sound is but a thin, audible slice of a much vaster vibrational spectrum and so we’re advised to move beyond theories of sound that place the listening subject at their centre and make human audition critical in theorising sound’s being. A prominent proponent of such phenomenological thinking is Pierre Schaeffer for whom sound’s essence - the sound object - is largely determined by the listening subject. Accordingly it is not what or how a sound sounds but what the subject does to it when listening that determines its essential nature. What sonic idealism fails to account for, in Goodman’s useful neologism, is unsound - those vibrations that lie beyond the threshold of human perception but are none-the-less affective. This poses a significant problem to any theory of sound - are vibrations, felt but not heard, sound? And if so how do we account for it when models of perception cannot?

Goodman’s solution is a non-anthropocentric ecology of affects where one entity (human or otherwise) affects another with its vibration. Internal vibrations, at a singular threshold, spill out into the world and reach other entities. This occurs prior to the division of subject and object and so prior to perception. An example lifted from Brain Massumi’s work on the affective sensorium: a car screeches dangerously towards you and, before you have recognised the sensation as sound, your body leaps out of harm’s way. Here the primary vibration startles and excites before the sound is meaningful. While sympathetic to Goodman’s attempt to problemetize and widen the limits of auditory experience, he is too hasty in the tout court rejection of anthropocentrism. Metaphysics of sound have long placed the human at their centre because sound is in part a human phenomenon. This isn’t to say, with the strict phenomenologists, that listening is essential to the existence of sound, but rather that it is in part a product of a very human relation to vibration. From the perspective of a theory attempting to grasp a human centred phenomena - sound - it seems retrogressive to remove the human subject. This has long been a challenge to any attempt at sonic realism: how do we understand sounds as independent objects (or events) when they are, at least partially, reliant upon human audition for there nature? Goodman’s rejection of anthropocentrism may also be troublesome for his own ecology of affects. Does not unsound have a specifically human quota? Is there not a range, albeit larger than that of audition, within which a vibration can affect the human body? And wouldn’t it be wise to start mapping this?

Another way around the unsound problem is to propose a non-Schaefferian sound object dichotomously composed of sound and unsound. Stretching Goodman’s notion a fair bit, unsound here would designate a sound object`s primary, vibrational qualities. Not just infra and ultra sonics but all transmitted (air bound) vibrations would be unsound. This dimension of the sound object would only be open to mathematical elaboration. Sound for its part would be the result of human interaction with unsound and emergent via affect, perception or an admixture of both.