[Saturday @ 11:00am – 12:30pm, Room 9]
Raphael Börger
“Smart Musical Infrastructures and “Infrastructuralization” – The Case of the Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT)”
Abstract
“[P]ositioned at the confluence of music technology, the Internet of Things, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence”, the Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT) “relates to the networks of computing devices embedded in physical objects (Musical Things) dedicated to the production and/or reception of musical content” (Turchet et al. 2020: 1). Presented as “ensembles” of interfaces, protocols and representations (Turchet 2018: 382) – of things and information – the “IoMusT technological infrastructure enables an ecosystem of interoperable devices that connect musicians with each other, as well as with audiences” (Turchet et al. 2021: 154). Insofar infrastructures entail, according to Brian Larkin, “things and the relations between things” (2013: 329; cf. Magaudda 2019), the IoMusT can be considered an infrastructure under construction whose developers envision it as a “calm technology” (Weiser/Brown 1997). With Weiser’s and Brown’s positive operationalization of a somewhat Heideggerian informed forgetfulness of technical being, the IoMusT research shares a tendency to let some critical relations fade into oblivion (cf. Larkin ibid.) – an oblivion for which Johannes Bruder coins the term “infrastructuralization” (2019). Through the lense of a “political ecology of music” (Devine 2019), it can thus be noted that IoMusT research infrastructuralizes its relationships with natural resources, its needs for electricity, and especially cooling systems to run server facilities.
Following the thread of infrastructuralization within the IoMusT research my paper seeks to reflect and situate musical infrastructures in terms of global and planetary (cf. Chakrabarty 2021) implications. In doing so, particular attention is given to those approaches to infrastructures that emphasize the political sides and sites. Taking the IoMusT research as an example, I try to shed some light on a potential vagueness of infrastructure research (Hesmondhalgh 2022) by contributing to a differentiation of the politics of infrastructures on a methodological and theoretical level.
Biography
Raphael Börger studied musicology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (BA, MA) with a focus on the theory and history of popular music, systematic musicology as well as transcultural musicology and historical anthropology of music. Master’s thesis at the intersections of the history of listening and sound, anthropology and the history of science, on noise-listening in the context of physical-acoustic industrial research around 1920 and in the field of a recent listening practice that mobilizes noise as a sleeping aid. Since fall 2022 research assistant at the Department of Musicology at the University of Potsdam. Member of the “Gesellschaft für Musikforschung” (GfM) and the “International Association for the Study of Popular Music” (IASPM D-A-CH).
Daniel Villegas Vélez
“Timbral Manipulations, Determined Unpredictability, and the Anthropocene in a Colombian Sound Installation”
Abstract
Fósil Acústico (2022) is a public sound installation in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, that invites visitors to engage in new modes of listening and interacting with a sonorous atmosphere, which they manipulate yet cannot fully control. The installation features a sculpture of the inner ear that serves as a touch interface for audiences to operate timbral manipulations over an enveloping synthesized drone generated through FM synthesis, itself controlled by a chaotic low frequency oscillator that evokes the deterministic unpredictability of changing weather patterns. Located inside a 16th-century cistern within the colonial city walls, the site-specific installation mediates between Cartagena’s colonial history and its current condition as a vulnerable site of anthropogenic climatic alterations, making it a paradigmatic place to examine the racial constitution of the Anthropocene (Yusoff 2019) from the perspectives of sound, listening, and touch.
Drawing on Tresch and Dolan’s (2013) critical organology, this paper argues that the installation models a sound-oriented ethics that is attuned to the challenges of climate change in the Caribbean. Visitors are invited to explore the object’s sculpture’s smooth, graphite surface, which serves as a capacitive sensor that modulates the timbral characteristics of the drone in unpredictable ways, owing to the sensor’s varying sensitivity as well as modulations from the chaotic LFO. The sculpture thus acts as an interface that enables immediate and determinate yet unpredictable effects on the timbral environment of the installation. In this way, what Tresch and Dolan call the object’s “material disposition” interrupts the traditional “mode of mediation” of standard instruments where specific actions result in invariable and controllable results.
The installation’s determined unpredictability thus amplifies Tresch and Dolan’s claim that human–object relations can be understood through the lens of ethics. By exceeding the instrumentality of the instrument, the sculpture in Fósil Acústico becomes a placeholder for diverse modes of alterity—human and non-human—affording visitors with the possibility of exploring modes of (self)relation through the interaction of listening and touch in the context of climate change. Overall, the paper argues for the relevance of critical organology as a theoretical framework for understanding the complex relationships between humans, objects, and climate crisis.
Biography
Daniel Villegas Vélez is a musicologist, philosopher, and sound artist living in Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). Daniel received his PhD in Musicology from the University of Pennsylvania (2016) and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University and at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Daniel’s work examines early modern/colonial musical performance and aurality; Western music aesthetics; and the role of timbre and technology in popular and experimental music, while his practice as a sound artist focuses on modular synthesizers, drones, and sound installations. His work has appeared in edited volumes such as Sound and Affect, The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, and journals including Performance Philosophy, and Tijdschrift voor Filosofie. Daniel is currently a research associate at the Matralab centre at Concordia University, where he is completing his first book manuscript, titled Mimetologies: Mimesis and Music 1600-1850 for Oxford University Press.
Brian House
“Macrophone Project”
Abstract
Normally too low-frequency to hear, infrasound travels vast distances through the atmosphere. It comes from calving glaciers, wildfires, energy infrastructure, and even HVAC systems at massive data centers. Big phenomena like these are entangled with the climate crisis. If we could hear infrasound, could we listen to the crisis as it unfolds across the globe?
The artistic research project Macrophones appropriates Cold War technology and combines it with cutting-edge signal processing and machine learning in order to make infrasound audible. Situated in locations including old-growth forests, the arctic tundra, and city centers, the installation comprises electronics that record microbarometric fluctuations through a sculptural wind filter. The recordings are processed and resampled upward into an acoustic range that we can hear, and via audio augmented reality, listeners at the site hear infrasound spatially situated in the landscape around them.
This paper discusses the artistic research behind the Macrophones project and situates it within historical and contemporary technological strategies for mediating large, distant, and complex phenomena. Perceiving via infrasound runs contrary to the visual modes that are currently dominant and the network and satellite infrastructure that supports them, invoking instead epistemologies developed in the context of music. The promise and pitfalls of such an approach are discussed, touching on augmented reality and the changing role of the body in interfaces for listening. Ultimately, Macrophones suggests that paying attention to how we are connected through the atmosphere, rather than through the internet, is both poetic and political.
Biography
Brian House is an artist who investigates the rhythms of human and nonhuman systems. Through sound, subversive technology, and multidisciplinary research, he makes our interdependencies audible in order to imagine new political realities. House has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Ars Electronica; the ZKM Center for Art and Media; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, among others, and is supported by Creative Capital. The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, The Guardian, and TIME’s annual “Best Inventions” issue have featured his work, and his academic writing has been published in Leonardo, Journal of Sonic Studies, Contemporary Music Review, and e-flux Architecture. House holds an MA in media studies and a PhD in computer music from Brown University and was Associate Scholar at Columbia University’s Center for Spatial Research. He is Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College.