The entanglements which make instruments musical: Rediscovering sociality

Abstract

A thing becomes a musical instrument by virtue of its use in a social context, a use of which its initial intended design (if it had one) forms only a part: sometimes a very small part.

Drawing on the notion of the ‘performance ecosystem’ this papersuggests that instrument designers/makers working with digital technologies might fruitfully attend further to the social contexts/constructs that characterise every level of musicking. It looks at the emergent, situated co-development of player, instrument and environment, suggesting that humans habitually use instruments to sense out, test and probe the possibilities of self-other relations in dynamic, mutually-engaging, and often playful and improvised behaviours.¹

KEYWORDS:

• Musical instruments
• design
• performance ecosystems
• ensembling
• musical sociality
• situatedness and entanglement

Notes

2 The term assemblage here points beyond the self-evidently problematic ‘component’ materiality of the instrument, via its ecosystemic interpenetrations, to Born’s (2011) ‘constellation of mediations’, theorised as four autonomous but enmeshed planes of social mediation, allowing for a non-reductive account of ‘music’s plural socialities’.

3 Owen Green (2014) articulates this with characteristic elegance: ‘a musical activity spreads out from its text, or software, to become embroiled in further flung social or musical networks, forming, in each instance, a particular musical assemblage … This embroilment is a feature of musical activity in general, but … work like Di Scipio’s can serve to make these interconnections conspicuous.’

4 As ever, John Blacking, an early influence on my thought, was prescient here. His How Musical is Man (Blacking, 1973) – much quoted for the title of its first chapter, ‘Humanly Organised Sound’ – ends with the less well-known ‘Soundly Organised Humanity’.

5 This topic is thus far most convincingly addressed by Goudard (2019).

6 SARC – the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast.

7 The NIME community has recently evidenced an impressive and increasing sense of self-critique, notably in its embracing of Hayes and Márquez-Borbón (2020), whose work corresponds strongly with my observations here.

8 Of course, the position of all listeners, including performer(s), with respect to the sound production and distribution/diffusion of sonic energy is a further environmental factor in the apprehension of the spectral qualities and morphology of that energy, hence my continuing interest in sonic proxemics (Waters, 2006, 1013, 2018). The relative localisation of sound/energy (intimate, local, environmental) is a key factor in establishing presence/co-presence, and it might be argued that the non-linearities in our sensitivity to frequency are in some sense a physical precondition for our capacity to discern sonic presence and proxemics.

9 To paraphrase Michael Edgerton, in an informal online review (12/12/2008), what is being communicated, if anything, rather than content, is communicability itself: the fact of another subjectivity, and by implication sociality and potentially community.

10 As Borgo (2018, p. 5) phrases it ‘our actions are either initiated from below the level of our conscious awareness or inflected by social dynamics of which we are seldom aware.’

11 These funded by the AHRB (ARiADA – Applied Research in Aesthetics in the Digital Arts) and EPSRC (Interactivity, Ubiquitous Technology and Music Performance).

12 Writer Alan Bennett chooses the same formulation to describe the act and process of writing: ‘I don’t put myself into my writing. I find myself there’.

13 A particularly poetic instance of the literal entanglement of player and instrument, demonstrated to me (07/04/2013) by Cassandre Barlosso-Bardin is that in which bagpipers playing instruments with single reeds habitually trap a strand of their own hair in the reed of the chanter, to facilitate its rapid speech and to prevent the reed sticking.

14 Indeed, in contexts where microphones, amplifiers and loudspeakers are introduced, the assemblage of the musical instrument can become indistinguishable from the assemblage of the environment. My old German double-bass is set up with low-tension strings and low action, with an increased neck angle, to give an even response and long sustain when plucked. It is acoustically relatively quiet, but this doesn’t matter as I rarely play it without amplification. This affords a combination of intimacy and clarity which couldn’t be achieved by making the instrument acoustically louder. It also allows someone who doesn’t practice sufficiently to play without pain. But the amplification is not scaleable. By using a small amplifier at low amplitude clarity and intimacy are optimised at the physical scale of the instrument. Increasing the amplitude further interferes with the acoustic modes of vibration of the instrument’s body, reducing clarity and reinforcing unhelpful frequency peaks and troughs in the instrument’s response. It might be argued that there are three socially distinct levels of amplified intervention which emerge at different historical moments and accumulate as technical potentials: the first is to make small sounds audible, or audible sounds somewhat louder; the second is where at which the dynamic range of reality is apparently increased, and third is where amplification habitually masks our engagement with the physical environment.

15 Behaviours are regarded as actions performed, and conduct as the relationship between those actions and expectations within a particular community of practice. Behaviour provides evidence of performance, while conduct is a judgement of the intelligibility/resolvability of that behaviour within the community’s practices. It’s worth noting that in this understanding of community, co-participants must be intelligible to each other – but they don’t have to agree about things. This affords a sense of community dynamism which values non-conformity as potentially positively transformative.

16 These extend beyond a critique of dependence upon a particular understanding of how language works, through observations on AI’s reliance on a particular set of assumptions about formalization and reasoning, to its conflation of representations and things.

17 In a recent Facebook discussion 08/11/19

18 It may be that iteration as a learning principle is not the problem, but that the discretized, goal-oriented version of it characteristic of HCI design processes obscures the flows and continuities which are a precondition for such extended thoughtful commitment.

19 I am most grateful to one of my anonymous reviewers for this line of thought, and for the introduction to the text in question.

20 Guitar manufacturers such as Taylor (www.taylorguitars.com/ebony project) have notably invested resources and research in experimenting with sustainable hardwoods, and others have followed pioneering German luthiers Gernot Wagner and Matthias Damman in using composite materials from the aerospace industry with appropriate lightness/stiffness in stringed instruments.

21 Thomastik-Infeld patented rope-core steel strings for stringed instruments in Infeld (1952). Thomastik’s Spirocore strings for double bass became available in 1961. LaFaro himself is documented as using a mixture of low-tension gut and steel strings on a bass set up with very low action, relying on microphones and amplification to compensate for the lower acoustic amplitude which resulted.

22 Bear in mind my earlier strictures, developed further below, about the inertia in human embodiment of knowledge and experience, despite which, the ‘swipe’, ‘double-click’, ‘scrolling’ and other types of conduct associated with touch-screen interaction have become consolidated in culture remarkably quickly. My generalisation regarding social legibility is also demonstrably less true in those areas of popular culture where performer legibility is less of an issue than surrounding discourses and behaviours associated with more pertinent social formations such as dancing and clubbing.

23 This is not only a problem in musical instrument design. A similar awkwardness to that observed in the NIME community is evident in the community associated with the International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO).

24 I learned this as an arrogant young electroacoustic composer – brought up on a discourse of ‘gesture’, ‘space’ and ‘transformation’ – and lucky enough to work with some of the world’s best choreographers. Turning up to a rehearsal with a notebook and a graphic score in order that I could make notes on what the choreography had missed in my management of gesture and form, I was both exhilarated and chastened to have the subtleties of my work simultaneously explained to and redefined for me by the experience of the dance.

25 Shane Latimer.

26 Jules Rawlinson, Owen Green and Dave Murray-Rust.

27 That individual instances can often be more instructive than ‘statistical’ surveys of ‘utility’ is given support thus by Cubitt (2013): ‘The unique instance can teach researchers as much as statistical samples or those abstractions that arrive either as axioms (there exists an X such that …) or hypotheses, maps or diagrams. The word ‘unique’ requires stressing. The core of the anecdote is not its typicality but its specificity; its ur-text is Clifford Geertz’s Thick Description (1973) but its history includes the tradition of close readings. The humanities have embraced study of individual poems, paintings, performances, or films as well as actions and historical situations. Studying these unique instances is expanded by observations of the unique nature of moments of reception and use.’ [italics added]

28 In Line – (https://orpheusinstituut.be/en/projects/line) as in other musical situations involving computers – digital technology distributes and augments human agency (in time, conceptually, in scale, geographically) in a manner beyond the prosthetics of conventional instruments.

29 Hybrid physical/virtual instruments enhance a capacity to sidestep the ‘fixities’ of materiality, but they inevitably require (some aspects of) interactions with humans to be designed, rather than resulting entirely from inherent material or bodily constraints.

30 In this respect, it manifests similar concerns to the Stefan Edwards’s 2004 project, Davros described in Waters 2007, in which the composer/performer expressed a concern to avoid imprecise or ‘flabby notions of interactivity’ by setting up a situation in which he and the computer ‘could influence each other’s behaviour, seeking to minimise the difference between us, while acknowledging that the ‘relationship’ isn’t equal.’

31 Melbye attributes the ontological gap between solo and group improvisation in large measure to the conventional instrument’s reliance on the energy supplied by the performer, hence his choice of a self-actuating feedback instrument as a means of flattening the hierarchic imbalance between instrument and player.

32 Of course, Melbye’s work here, like much other solo practice, is in some sense always ‘as if’ socialising; a sustained investigation into self-other relations through musicking.

33 Illustrated at https://vimeo.com/428245351, https://vimeo.com/428243367 and https://vimeo.com/428242004

34 A more recent work (Waters, 2019) continues to explore this possibility by ‘animating’ the silent space of a historic library with local voices emanating from multiple hidden loudspeakers in such a manner that visitors feel allowed or encouraged to talk.

35 e.g. sensors, microcontrollers, actuators.

36 Technically what is simulated is actually the sound of the string-bridge-plate coupled together, listened to through the plate,

37 This type of structure is eerily prefigured in the work Radio Pieces broadcast on Resonance FM in June 2002 by one of my research students, Stefan Edwards, described in Waters (2009): ‘listeners are encouraged to phone into a radio station while keeping their radios, tuned to the same station, as near to the telephone as possible. The resulting acoustic feedback from the open phone-lines, mixed and balanced by the composer at the radio station as it happens, animates this ‘central’ space with the influence of the distributed, external spaces occupied by the listeners, providing the ‘silent’ core with ‘content’ to broadcast.37 The social elements, distributedness and emergence, are as significant here as the sonic components. The ecosystem is both sonic and social.’

38 Exemplified by Jacob Collier’s exuberant (2013) rendition of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing’