Unsound Sound: On the Ontology of Sound in the Digital Age

2020

The research is a very insightful and informative contribution to the emerging digital world focus on the literature on vinyl records. The study combines a cultural sociological approach with insights from material cultural studies, supporting and illustrating their theoretical discussion with frequently fascinating material from several interviews. This project investigates the reasons behind vinyl records persistence within our technologically accelerated culture & provide meticulous details as to how materiality matters in our digital world. This project focuses on establishing vinyl's status as a 'special object'. The dissertation is written with love for vinyl records, their aesthetics and the forms of social life they foster. In the digital years we live, with the usage of smart phones and mp3 technologies, users have easily access to the global sounds. Vinyl records seek the persistence of an older technology of the consumption & production of music. Vinyl demonstrates the ways how the material objects play a significant role in our everyday lives, not only through the sound quality but also through the feeling. Welcome to the world of the post-digital.

CTheory, 2006

By dividing the interpretation of an art work into several distinct "levels" it becomes possible to recognize a fundamental distinction between digital and non-digital art works, as well as realize the underlying ideology is based upon the illusion of infinite resources; as such it replicates the underlying ideology of capitalism itself-that there is an infinite amount of wealth that can be extracted from a finite resource. It is an illusion that emerges in fantasies that digital technology ends scarcity by aspiring to the condition of information. The digital

This essay patches object-oriented software and object-oriented ontology into each other, on the gambit that their shared circuit might in turn resonate with the phenomenological lockbox in which Pierre Schaeffer originally placed the objet sonore when he invented this term of art and the compositional practice of musique concrete in 1948. The current software environments in which we create, distort, transform and use digital sound objects has more in common with Schaeffer’s disavowed formulation than we may realize, and we need the conceptual resources of both object oriented software and object oriented ontology in order to understand why. In a concluding coda, I critically respond to Alexander Galloway’s deployment of this same resemblance between software and ontology.

2012

This paper discusses the complex relationships between the current digital culture and contemporary technoscientific thought, guided by Information Technologies (ITs) model. We describe how this kind of thought has been structured as an internalized modern self arises, with a view of the world as an intellectual construct. We use the universes and discourses about the digital and analog sounds as an example of the Faustian and Promethean ideals of technologies, concepts proposed by the sociologist Hermínio Martins.

This paper develops an ontological-aesthetic perspective on sound that draws primarily on the works of the philosophers Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Karen Barad. The basic starting point is here, how to think sound in itself, a fundamental question in 20th and 21st century music and sound art. I argue for a dialectical materialism of sound which I set off against a Deleuzian materialism of sound developed by the philosopher Christoph Cox. Instead of identifying sound with a quasi-palpable material stuff, the paper will revolve around the idea of a split or antagonism and a conception of the real as tied to a void, in which neither subject nor object are primary

Organised Sound, 2019

This article proposes a conception of sound as the material of artistic experimentation. It centres on a discussion of the nature of sound’s ontological status and aims to contribute to a new understanding of the role of materiality in artistic practices. A central point of discussion is Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of the sound object, which is critically examined. The phenomenological perspective that underlies the concept of the sound object depicts sound as an ideal unity constituted by a subject’s intentionality. Thus, it can barely grasp the physicality of sounds and their production or their reality beyond individual perception. This article aims to challenge the notion of the sound object as a purely perceptual phenomenon while trying to rethink experimentation as a practical form of thought that takes place through interacting with sonorous material. Against the background of recent object-oriented and materialist philosophical theories and by drawing on the Heideggerian concept of the thing and Gilbert Simondon’s theories of perception and individuation, this article strives to outline a conception of sound as a non-symbolic otherness. The proposed idea of thingness revolves around a morphogenetic conception of the becoming of sonorous forms that links their perception to their physicality.

TILDA conference, 2022

Digital Creativity, 2019

This paper explores the possibility of constructing an unreal environment through sound, particularly through the use of contemporary digital tools. The idea of the unreal is approached as a not being-in-the-world experience. That is, an experience which expands the natural embodied physicality. And yet, sound propagation through a physical space, which led to the study of reverberation and spatialization as the main subjects of interest. Consequently, reverb became the main tool to explore the subject in practice. Due to the project's multidisciplinarity, the subject had different approaches: from the possibility of reverb as a tool for fiction-making, to listener's comprehensibility and readability of the events; exploring spatialization techniques and multichannel reproduction systems to finally conclude with the idea that, in the end, sound relies on the listener's actual physical experience of the space.