Network[ed] Listening—Towards a De-centering of Beings

Abstract

In this paper, I question modes of listening in network music performance environments, and specifically draw on my experience as a performer listening in these scenarios. I situate network listening within the context of current music making, and refer to changes in compositional practices that draw specific attention to listening. I argue that some of these compositional developments play a determining role in articulating a new discourse of listening. Eric Satie's concept of Furniture Music, Schaeffer's ideas on reduced listening, Oliveros' deep listening practices as well as digital music platforms all serve to show a development towards a proliferation in listening experiences. I expand this narrative to listening practices in network performance environments, and identify a specific bodily fragility in listening in and to the network. This fragile state of listening and de-centered kind of performative being allow me to draw parallels to the Japanese art form Butoh and Elaine Scarry's metaphor of beauty. My own performance experiences, set within the context of several critical texts, allow me to see network[ed] listening as an ideal corporeal state, which offers a rethinking of linear conceptions of the other and a subject's own relation with her world. Ultimately, network[ed] listening posits listening as a corporeal and multi-dimensional experience that is continuously being re-shaped by technological, socio-political and cultural concerns.

Keywords:

• Network
• Performance
• Fragility
• Corporeal Listening
• Butoh
• Beauty

Notes

1‘Sinnkultur’ needs to be understood as a ‘culture of the sense’, but more in terms of ‘making sense’, of understanding, of grasping a context.

2I understand a network environment as a performance space that distributes bodies, sounds, instruments and acoustics, and delineate performing with bodies in disparate sites from performing with bodies in the same physical space. The argument that performing, and with it listening, in the same physical space is equal to performing in a networked environment does not hold true for me.

3I am not arguing that a body in a non-performative state does not experience these senses; my point is that a performative body is trained particularly to perceive and intensely experience these states during a performance.

4Sensable Technologies, a developer of 3D touch-enabled technologies, for instance provides software and tactile devices in medical areas such as dental restoration, 3D organic design (http://www.sensable.com).

5In contrast to listening, which can only occur at the same time as the event, Nancy argues that the visual presence exists before we even see it, the ear making the world resonant whereas the eye makes the world evident. Nancy claims that there is no reciprocity between sight and hearing: the visual is mimetic (‘on the side of an imaginary capture’), whereas the sonorous is methexic (‘having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion’) (Nancy, [2002] 2007, p. 10).

6Salomé Voegelin recently argued for sound's capacity to augment, challenge and expand the visual sense; a move against the ‘totallising ability of the visual’ (2010, p. 10). Voegelin states that, ‘[s]eeing is a dialectical act of comparison and differentiation,’ since it ‘assumes that the seen is there before my spotting it’ (Voegelin, 2010, p. 24).

7McLuhan had said that this could well lead to hallucinations, as these are more likely to occur when one of the brain's hemispheres is favoured over the other. It is tempting to anticipate future debates that position network performances, which tend to favour the aural and tactile senses over the visual, as a state of hallucination (recalling William Gibson's definition of cyberspace as a ‘consensual hallucination’).

8 Satie's first ‘Musique d'ameublement’ compositions date back to 1923, and include his last score for the 1924 film Entr'acte by René Clair, part of the ballet Relâche for which Satie likewise wrote the music (Marks, 1983).

9Milhaud states, Satie was right: nowadays, children and housewives fill their homes with unheeded music, reading and working to the sound of the wireless. And in all public places, large stores and restaurants, the customers are drenched in an unending flood of music. It is ‘musique d'ameublement’, heard, but not listened to. (Milhaud in Orledge, 1995)

10Adorno and Simpson (1941, p. 25).

11The idea of providing more than simply purchasable goods in the capitalist market, and to offer alongside the goods a more encompassing, memorable and individualised/personalised experience is taken up by Pine and Gilmore (1999) in their book The Experience Economy, drawing on ideas developed in German sociologist Schulze's Die Erlebnisgesellschaft (1992).

12Small's argument runs counter the musicologist Dahlhaus' (1983) view that the subject of music, and indeed the cornerstone of music history, is the work rather than the event; i.e. that the musical composition rather than its performance (i.e. positing creation over praxis) is music's defining aspect.

13This way of thinking about listening also bears parallels to the ecological theories of musical perception as outlined by Eric Clarke, who turns our attention to the relationship between ‘environmentally available information and the capacities, sensitivities, and interests of a perceiver’ (Clarke, 2005).

14Brandon LaBelle conceives of this integral union of instrument and body as a single body: he states that the musical instrument initiates a dynamic exchange between the body and material objects: an instrument functions as a partner in the unfolding of musical expression, where an individual and object are integrated, becoming a single body driven by choreography of movement and energy, precision and improvisation, skill and its reciprocal gestures. The body moves differently when incorporating the musical instrument, while the instrument implies the body, presupposing the individual by its very design, where arms and legs are given new fittings, and the imagination is driven by the material potential of strings and their harmonics, objects and their textures.

15A network performance scenario offers the possibilities of engaging (with) the other, without the reliance on the visual representation of the other, foregrounding the performer's own embodied state, her fantasies and suppositions. Indeed, the network denies us access to a visual understanding of the other body, and thus resists a visualised comprehension of the other, but I want to emphasise that performers in, and of, the network are appreciating this as an advantage rather than as a negative side effect of an emerging technology. The often-assumed supremacy of the visual over the aural sense has never really been a point of argument for musicians.

16Butoh dance is a Japanese avant-garde dance originated by Tatsumi Hijikata in the 1960s. Butoh body is a literal translation of the Japanese ‘butoh-tai’, with the emphasis being on ‘tai’ referring to a state of mind or attitude. It is often referred to as a ‘mental-physical attitude’ with both these being deeply interconnected. Butoh searches for the mind and body ‘as an integrated, mutually influencing unit’ (Kasai & Parsons, 2003, p. 5). This Japanese art highlights the vulnerability of the body; it posits the body as debilitated, and its natural decline and wearing-out are accepted (Kuniyoshi, 1991). Butoh seeks the dissolution of the self in the body, and is often referred to as a ‘un-dance’ (Kasai, 2000). For example, by means of barely visible bodily movements the performer may shift air from the right to the left lung via the trachea. Another example of the ‘un-dance’ can be found in Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh of ‘a dead man standing in desperation’ (Kasai, 2000). Such description very much foregrounds a conceptual understanding of the performative body, and Hijikata's Butoh specifically developed certain techniques that were not only non-existent in Western dance at the time, but also that focused on a conceptual use of the body. One such technique is te-boke (absent minded hands), where the dancer's hands are supposed to be wandering ‘anxiously in the air with no practical purpose’ (Kuniyoshi, 2004, p. 3).

17Thanks to Sally Jane Norman for pointing to the non ocular premise of the network!