On vibrations: cosmographs

ABSTRACT

Vibrations have emerged as a construct within cultural theory, intersecting significantly with sound studies, discourses on materiality and concepts of music qua music. This paper pulls two paragraphs from this literature that picture an idealised cosmic continuity as a means to examine some general features of the theory. These cosmographs are framed in historical and rhetorical contexts, across considerations of elementary physics and figurations of other energies, based upon the substances that mechanical vibrations require and theoretical vibrations imagine. Rhetorical transformation from vibrations to rhythms, with their inscriptive capacity for ordering beyond material immediacies, is questioned, as is the reliance of both upon a naturalisation of cycles given that a unity of circadian and seasonal cycles has long been broken by climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Vibrations in cultural theory
• energies in cultural theory
• sound studies
• physics and the arts
• cosmographs

Acknowledgments

My gratitude goes first to Bastien Gallet and Matthieu Saladin for their invitation to address this topic and to the institutions that supported them; to Peter Blamey, Raviv Ganchrow, Lindsay Kelley, Seth Kim-Cohen, Jacob Smith and Pia van Gelder for invaluable conversations and correspondence; and to the journal reviewers for their insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. To set the register, what Linda Dalrymple Henderson has called vibratory modernism bases itself in a rigorous historical research (Henderson 2002, 1983) and the vibrational in Nina Sun Eidsheim’s book Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Eidsheim 2015) uses the term analytically. I place my own writings on vibration in a cultural history that attempts to remain close to artistic self-assignation and attribution (Kahn 2004, 2013). A surprising number of recent writings on both theoretical and cultural historical vibrations have personal and professional connections with dance floors: Julian Henriques’ analysis of reggae dancehall is accompanied by tropes of vibration, but also opens to pluralistic notions of energy (Henriques 2011, 2010); the cultural historian Shelley Trower acknowledged her interests as having arisen from British dance floors in the early 1990s (Trower 2012; Enns and Trower 2013); Paul Jasen, author of Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience (2016) is himself a DJ; Marcus Boon, who is completing a book,The Politics of Vibration attributes his drive to pre-rave British dance floors; and Goodman can be credited with initialising this trend.

2. This table has been redesigned by Dr. Pia van Gelder for this essay based upon Crookes’ “Address by the President” to the General Meeting of the Society for Psychical Research, Westminster Town Hall (Crookes 1897). Citations in the table are from Crookes himself, as are the numerical figures standing out from the gradient, as in “actual sensation of light.”

3. On the stutter-step vernacular of the classical and modern in physics, with a glance towards the arts, see Richard Staley (2005).

4. See Michael Gallope’s related discussion of Pythagoreanism and Deleuzean rhythms (Gallope 2017).

5. Wherever we might be at this exact moment on the trajectory of the sliding tone, the cosmic microwave background actually hisses electromagnetically which, when transduced, is not that danceable. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, the first ones to tune in, had to clean their horn antenna to make sure that pigeon shit would not be confused with the universe, even though the poet Cendrars (1966, 72) would have found confirmation for his observation that “One hears shit from every corner of the universe.”

6. Thompson (2017, 266–282), and Goh (2017, 283–304) critique Christoph Cox; with his response (Cox 2018, 234–242). Cox, Goodman and Greg Hainge are examined in Brian Kane’s “Sound Studies without Auditory Culture: A Critique of the Ontological Turn” (2015, 2–21), invoking Ruth Leys’ analysis of Brian Massumi’s affect theory (Leys 2011, 434–472).

7. Altman found one version exercised “not from the enemies of sound, but from its greatest defenders,” i.e., in how Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler in Composing for Films “attribute to hearing a privileged relation to pre-individualistic collective times; music thus has a pre-capitalistic nature, being more direct and more closely connected to the unconscious” (Atlman  [1992] 2012, 228). In proto-sound studies, sound could still have enemies and defenders. The fallacy also operated among his contemporaries who took recourse to psychoanalysis, specifically, the natalist theories of Guy Rosolato and Didier Anzieu, “who characterize the voice as archaic” based on hearing the “soothing voice of the mother from the womb long before we are able to see,” and refuses any (blinding) “assumption of unity and concordance” that presumes “to cover all possible practices” (228).

8. Schafer, the World Soundscape Project, and acoustic ecology have been very important for many practitioners but has largely remained isolated from developments in theory and cultural analysis, except as objects of critique. An important exception has been how Schafer served as a touchstone to Steven Feld’s influential concept of acoustemology in anthropology. However, the assent to “focus on the sense of nervousness in Schafer’s lovely and precise schiz- word,” as he brings the schismogenesis of Gregory Bateson into play with Schafer’s schizophonics (Feld 1994) has its own issues, since Schafer’s use was a fraught reckoning of psychopathology at a socio-political scale characteristic of the 1970s (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari), made even more problematic when mapped upon its split between nature and urbanism within policy and design.

9. See Monica Gagliano, et. al., “Towards Understanding Plant Bioacoustics,” (Gagliano, Mancuso, and Robert 2012); Peggy S. M. Hill, Vibrational Communication in Animals (Hill 2008); and Gerhardt and Huber, Acoustic Communication in Insects and Anurans: Common Problems and Diverse Solutions (Gerhardt and Huber 2002), for example, the chapter “Broad-Scale Patterns of Evolution.”

10. For a restatement, see McDonald, Grosz and Rothfield (2006).

11. Here is the passage referred to: “… all kind of milieus […] slide in relation to one another, over one another. Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of material, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 313).

12. See Kahn (2013, 178–79). Similarly, John Cage wanted to put an ashtray (it is “… in a state of vibration. We’re sure of that, and the physicist can prove it to us”) inside a small anechoic chamber and listen to where “object would become process; we would discover, thanks to a procedure borrowed from science, the meaning of nature through the music of objects” (Cage 1981, 220–21).

13. In his later discussion of the poetics of the blue of the sky, Bachelard would write, “The substantial imagination of air is truly active in a dynamics of dematerialisation. (…) it is by following the scale of the dematerialisation of celestial blue that we can see aerial reverie at work. Then we will understand that it is an aerial Einfühlung: the fusion of a dreamer with as undifferentiated a universe as possible, one that is blue and gentle, infinite and formless, with a minimum of substance” (Bachelard 1988, 162–63, emphases in original). Raman and Bachelard’s blue infatuation eventually found its way to Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue.

14. See Graves (2019, 332–350), and Ventura, Gullà, Graves, et al., “Cell Melodies: When Sound Speaks to Stem Cells” (2017).

15. See for example, Foster and Leon Kreitzman, Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing (2004); Schmidt, Chen and Hattar, “Intrinsically Photosensitive Retinal Ganglion Cells: Many Subtypes, Diverse Functions,” (2011); and Bunn, Wave Forms: A Natural Syntax for Rhythmic Languages (2002).

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Douglas Kahn

Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation, UNSW Art & Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney, and Professor Emeritus, University of California at Davis. An historian and theorist of the arts, with concentration on energies, sound and media, his books include Energies in the Arts; Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts; and Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts.