The Timbre of Trash:
Rejecting Obsolescence through Collaborative New Materialist Sound Production
In: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies. Vol. 1, No. 2
Late capitalist production is highly dependent upon the continuous manufacture of new goods to be brought to market. The idea of obsolescence plays a key role in this process, as more recent commodities replace older, presumably less-effective products. This process is especially prominent in the technological sector, which routinely encourages the deliberate replacement of older devices— even when still functional. Digital audio technologies fall in line with these practices, and are often produced using exploitative labor practices. A serious consideration of these effects poses a difficult question for sonic artists who use electronic and digital equipment in their practice. Specifically, how can sound practitioners begin to account for and push against their tacit contribution to the detrimental effects of obsolescence entailed by the tools of their craft?
This article explores this question through the lens of new materialist discourse, which outlines modes of engaging with the physical world that reject the assumption that objects are static. Instead, they employ an understanding of objects as collective agents in constant active assemblage of shared material actions that include the presence of human bodies as part of a continuum of objects within larger systems of capital, labor, and politics. The electronic audio practices of American sonic artists who incorporate obsolete, broken, and discarded objects in their work will act as case studies for this exploration. Their work helps understand possible collaborative implementations of technological audio production that recognize the collective agency involved in their physical and aural production.
Sounding new materialism: enchantment and audio technology
In: Seismograf Journal, June 2020
To utilize technological devices for creative ends is also to contribute to the cycle of production and obsolescence involved in global capitalism. A serious consideration of the electronic artist’s position within this framework invites an ethical examination of technologically-based practice in relation to the overall waste and exploitation that its connection to technological commodification entails. How does a sonic artist come to terms with the global effects of the tools of her trade?
I offer that the embrace of the perspectives posed by new materialist thought has the potential to act as a means to address the broad contextual issues surrounding creative technology. Specifically, I address three modes of understanding sound technology informed by Jane Bennett’s conception of enchantment. Collectively, they offer possible avenues to facilitate an understanding of technology that allows for technological praxis, while confronting its destructive legacy.
Strategies Against Progress: New Materialist Models to Resist Obsolescence in Technological Sound Practices
Full Dissertation - UCSD, 2017
Electronic sound artists and musicians, in their choice of the tools of their craft, have a close, working relationship with a specific form of mass-produced commodity, that of technological audio devices. Like other manufactured goods, they originate from a global production system that is historically exploitative, and environmentally unsustainable. The nature of electronic and digital technology, however, warrants an additional layer of scrutiny: they are beholden to the expectations of continuous technological improvement and obsolescence.
To counter these continuing tendencies, I offer a reading of new materialist theory with an eye toward how it may be specifically applied to electronic and digital musicians. New materialism projects a monistic perception of the world, in which the differentiation between humans, non-humans, and objects is called into question. Applied to technological audio devices, porous boundaries allow a vision of audio technology that is inclusive of all the bodies with which it has come in contact, and urges a limited sense of anthropomorphic identification with its users. This sense of interaction is extended into the realm of audio feedback, in which all audio processors, regardless of their intended functionality, contribute to a common sonic end. Seen in this way, sound technology that was once subject to the whims of constant development, becomes imbued with a personal sense of vitality, making it more difficult to be perceived as a disposable and obsolete.
“Designing Intent: Defining Critical Meaning for NIME Practitioners.”
In: Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. Copenhagen, Denmark 2017
The ideation, conception and implementation of new musical interfaces and instruments provide more than the mere construction of digital objects. As physical and digital assemblages, interfaces also act as traces of the authoring entities that created them. Their intentions, likes, dislikes, and ultimate determinations of what is creatively useful all get embedded into the available choices of the interface. In this light, the self-perception of the musical HCI and instrument designer can be seen as occupying a primary importance in the instruments and interfaces that eventually come to be created. The work of a designer who self-identifies as an artist may result in a vastly different outcome than one who considers him or herself to be an entrepreneur, or a scientist, for example. These differing definitions of self as well as their HCI outcomes require their own means of critique, understanding and expectations. All too often, these definitions are unclear, or the considerations of overlapping means of critique remain unexamined.
In this paper, I offer five broad cultural categories for understanding contrasting histories, as well as creative and technical discourses surrounding musical HCI production, specifically relating to the New Instruments for Musical Expression community. These are offered to spur conversation toward a more complete and complex definition of the self as a designer and the objects of creation within this context, and are not intended to propose hard limitations or boundaries within the community. To the contrary, they are for consideration as porous and available to permutation and change as circumstance and the community at large sees fit
“Paying It Forward: Sound Art Strategies For The Post-Anthropocene.”
In: Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Music Conference. Brisbane, Australia 2016
In the 1980s, geographer Eugene F. Stoermer coined a term that has achieved pronounced attention in the 21st century. Known as the Anthropocene, the conception refers to a geological period of time from the late 19th century to the present, in which the most profound force affecting change on the earth is the collective, often unconscious action of humanity.
In order for sound art to sustain meaning and functionality across epochs, new conceptions of time and materiality and their relationship to sound must be examined. In this text, I will use the conceit of the Anthropocene to provide a framework for envisioning and designing sound art that is informed by the prospect of the end of an era in which human activity is identified as being the primary agent of change on Earth. In doing so, I will outline strategies that can be put into place to evoke, for inhabitants of the far future, a very personal and aural sense of the contemporary moment.
http://www.sonicenvironments.org/uploads/2/0/1/3/2013969/04cantrell_acmc2016.pdf
"The Breath Engine: Challenging Biological and Technological Boundaries through the Use of NK Complex Adaptive Systems"
In: Proceedings of the ICMC|SMC. Athens, Greece 2014 pp. 767 - 771
The Breath Engine is an interface and performance system that draws focus to the ephemeral nature of the actions of living beings and how they intersect with the world of the artificial and computational.
The piece relies on human respiration to create and affect a generative sound synthesis system modeled on evolutionary algorithms. The respiration system is controlled by 1 - 3 participants, who wear oxygen masks that transfer the breath of the performers into electromechanical pressure sensors mounted in the project enclosure. These sensors convert the respiration levels of each performer into digital information, which is then used to affect a self-generative audio synthesis system. This generation is based on NK complex adaptive systems, which mathematician Stephen J. Lansing purports to be a potentially important factor in determining long term changes in mechanical and natural systems, such as biological evolution. This system generates iterative arrays of timbre and frequency that are perturbed by data received from the breathing sensors, causing chaotic reactions that eventually coalesce into repeating patterns.
In this way, the piece will enact an evolving visual and sonic environment that questions the boundaries between the biological and the technological.