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Abstract
This essay sets out to explore the tactilization of sound in electronic dance music (EDM), which offers an important sensory–affective bridge between touch, sonic experience, and an expansive sense of connection in dancing crowds. Electronic dance music events tend to engender spaces of heightened tactility and embodied intimacy, and so it should not be surprising that their musical aesthetics also highlight tactility. In track titles, lyrics, and other text-based media surrounding this genre, ‘feeling’ is often deployed in a polyvalent manner, highlighting the conceptual overlap between emotion, affective knowing, perception, and touch. This bleed between modes of feeling extends into the sound of recordings themselves, which use vibration to engage with tactile, haptic, and kinaesthetic senses in addition to hearing. This article focuses on ‘house’ and ‘techno’ styles of electronic music, especially the ‘minimal’ continuum of sub-styles that were in ascendancy during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These styles invoke tactility through a range of modalities, of which three will be the focus of this essay: percussive ‘beats’, fleshy timbre, and sonic grain. The notion of sonic grain will be developed through a close engagement with the work of musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer – in particular, his yet-to-be-translated treatise on sound objects, Traité des objets musicaux, published by Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1966. While building upon existing studies of aesthetics in electronic music, this article strikes out in an orthogonal direction, attempting to account for aspects of this genre that are not well described in terms of symbolic representation or musical form. The aim here is to go beyond the representation of tactility in lyrics and visual imagery, turning instead to the sound of electronic dance music itself, which foregrounds percussion, texture, grain, and other sonic elements that resonate with heightened haptic experience.
Acknowledgements
Both the research and writing of this article were made possible by support from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Special thanks go to Margrit Pernau, Ashkan Sepahvand, Zeynep Bulut, and Brandon LaBelle for providing me with opportunities to develop and refine my analysis. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their immensely helpful comments and suggestions.
Notes
1. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 17.
2. Electronic dance music (EDM) is a broad term originally developed in academic and journalistic contexts to refer to the entire field of post-disco, sample-based dance music without reducing it to its venues (e.g. ‘club music’, ‘rave music’), prioritizing one style over others (e.g. ‘techno music’), or conflating it with very different musical fields that have already laid claim to ‘electronic music’ (e.g. ‘electro-acoustic music’). A recent popularization of the term – especially the acronym – in mainstream media, however, has complicated the semantic field such that it can also refer to a more limited spectrum of dance music genres that have gained mainstream popularity in North America since 2010 (e.g. dubstep, moombahton, trap). Nonetheless, the usage of ‘EDM’ in this article refers to the term’s initial use as an analytic meta-category.
3. For example, Omar featuring Stevie Wonder, “Feeling You”; Sylvester, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”; Donna Summer, “I Feel Love”; Nightcrawlers “Push The Feeling On” (see Audiography).
4. Garcia, “Can You Feel It, Too?”.
5. Amico, “I Want Muscles”; Bradby “Sampling Sexuality”; Hesmondhalgh, “International Times”; Hughes, “In the Empire of the Beat”; Loza “Sampling (Hetero)sexuality”; Nyong'o, “I Feel Love”.
6. Butler, “Hearing Kaleidoscopes”; Butler, Unlocking the Groove; Garcia, “On and On”; Solberg, “Waiting for the Bass to Drop”.
7. Original quote: “Es geht um Lautstärke und um Bass. Also, du hörst die Musik nicht nur, sondern die hat einen ganz direkten, körperlichen Impakt. Dir schlackern die Hosenbeine, wenn du vor der Bassbox stehst.” Classen, Feiern.
8. Pinch and Trocco, Analog Days.
9. Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 18.
10. Ibid., 196.
11. Herbert, “Personal Contract”.
12. Smalley, “Defining Timbre – Refining Timbre, ” 35.
13. Ibid., 36.
14. Peirce, The Essential Peirce.
15. See Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure”.
16. See Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux; Chion, Guide des objets sonores; Chion, Guide to Sound Objects.
17. Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice.”
18. The original French term that Schaeffer uses, entretien, is difficult to translate precisely, although in everyday usage it is closest to ‘maintenance’ in English. This has been translated variously as ‘sustainment’ (see Dack and North’s translation of Chion, Citation2009) and ‘continuant phase’ (Smalley, “Spectromorphology"). I have chosen to use ‘sustain’ instead, in order to emphasize its conceptual and formal similarities with ‘sustain’ as an element of the ADSR amplitude envelope described earlier in this essay.
19. Schaeffer, quoted in Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 171.
20. See Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux, 584–87.
21. Ibid., 551–52.
22. Ibid., 554–55.
23. ‘Parler d'un son rugueux ou mat, velouté ou limpide, c'est comparer le son à une pièrre, à une peau, à un velours, à une eau courante. ’ Ibid., 551.
24. ‘Ce ne sont pas les objets mêmes de la vision ou de l'audition qui importent, mais leur agencement.’ Ibid., 551.
25. Gabor, “Theory of Communication”; Gabor, “Acoustical Quanta and the Theory of Hearing”; Meyer-Eppler, Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informationstheorie; Moles, Les musiques expérimentales; Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception; Roads, Microsound; Truax, “Real-Time Granular Synthesis”; Wiener, “Spatial–Temporal Continuity”; Xenakis, “Elements of Stochastic Music. ”
26. Roads, Microsound, 86.
27. Ibid., 105.
28. Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure.”
29. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 13.
30. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems.
31. Spinoza, Ethics.
32. See Bergson, Matter and Memory; Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?; Massumi, Parables for the Virtual.
33. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 15.
34. Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 47.
35. Ibid., 16.
36. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.