Digital Music and Media Theory: A Manifesto for the Information Age
Digital music and media theory
Achim Szepanski
Mille Plateaux, one of the leading electronic-music labels, is celebrating its one-hundredth release and, with this milestone, launching a book project that examines the central concerns of contemporary electronic music. Authors from music, media theory, philosophy, software programming, art, and related fields are invited to contribute. To frame the project, we put forward a series of provisional theses.
Today music is information, convertible into binary code. In every manifestation it is tied to computer systems, embedded in what can be called the “age of technology,” and describable through a techno-aesthetic concept to which electronic media are anything but external. This is media-music, irrespective of whether one treats media as constructivistic, as technical dispositives, as a distorted atopic space of transmissions, or as something else. One should not overlook approaches that work with the trivalent operations of Gotthard Günther, Deleuze’s theory of the virtual, the hybrid media theories of Michel Serres, or a view of the medial as an economics of general interchangeability in which bits are always given doubly and thereby enable the transfer of any information. It is remarkable that, aside from the explication of mediality in signifiers and the vast discourse around ways of seeing, the musical field is seldom addressed within media theory. If, in the visual domain, illustration and interpretation of reality increasingly give way to a visualization of pure visibility, few media concepts acknowledge the musical information packages and their medial constructions, which — in their ecstatic proliferation — do not represent reality but only themselves.
Following Clément Rosset, music constitutes a form of language (on the neuro-biological and linguistic problems with this statement, see Robert Jourdain’s Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy), a chain of signifiers that lacks any reference to a signified. Music does not carry messages but instead offers empty signification, resisting every attempt at decoding. It therefore permits nearly any interpretation. Its only content is its own sound and the sound of a reality outside itself. More precisely, music might best be called a function that crosses different units and forms a transversal whose expression neither refers to references nor to meanings. Today music is conceived within virtual difference spaces whose coordinates include the act, the programmer, the software, and the hardware.
Knowledge of mechanical processing and internal signal control demonstrates that programmers have long functioned as designers. Designing — namely the development of the desktop and the interfaces — replaces design processes formerly done by hardware. Software programming becomes the field of the designer; the ergonomics of hardware lose importance in favour of the design of immaterial parameters (icons, buttons, windows, etc.) that grant access to the program control system, while the physical materiality of signal paths and channels recedes. Input data, modifications, and transformations of signals merge on hybrid surfaces of storage and program control.
As long as the power-theoretical implications of media music go unexamined, it becomes tempting to ascribe a sense-context to music (the endless discourses on pop dissidence attest to this) — a signified of strength that is actualised within music: whether one sees music as the expression of the subject’s truth or as the truth of a group’s subversive collective power. Then the tonally medial is translated into cynical signs that occupy a referential space containing a secret still to be interpreted. But music’s relation to discourse is not one of interpretation or translation; it is a disjunction. What is audible does not correspond to what is said. In medial dispositives, for instance in Foucault’s film analysis or in today’s network music, there exists a non-correspondence of the visible to the statement, or of the tonal to the statement, yet the two are asymmetrically bound together. Deleuze refers to this as
mutual attacks of heterogeneous forms. Electronic music questions media theory; conversely, it develops questions that are never translated linearly into music. Deleuze also plays with trivalency when he locates questions, confrontations, and impulses in a “non-location” equivalent to an informal dimension of power relations that actualise themselves in forms. To what extent does the Foucault triangle (statements, visibility, power), which opens dualism onto a pragmatics of the manifold, correspond to statements about medial-technical dispositives capable of thinking through the relations among media, power, and music more complexly than current pop discourse?
Music has ceased to be a mathematical science of intervals, of the spaces between tones categorised as harmonies, or a classificatory music in which different frequencies are matched with the twelve tones. Electronic synthesis instruments sound within the intervals, between them; analogue media store the real as infinitely variable, independent of the dictate of notation and the imperativism of analogue instruments. But only digital machines cover up meaning, disrupt sense, and delete historical markings and traces. They do not distinguish; they calculate. Everything is determined and computable. Sampling already evades the cut-up method, which perpetually confirms the unity of its system by cutting and adding texts. Sampling requires a program-controlled procession of signals as an autonomously working transformation. Its software applications feature stretch, repeat, cut-copy-paste, making it possible to sample programs themselves. This obsoletes the differentiation between data and programs in self-referential processes. Computers work recursively: the results of their calculations provide the connection device for further calculations. They optimise the unforeseeable when the original conditions of the system cannot be restored through reversal, while simultaneously introducing non-linearity. Both feed into the entanglements of program routines.
Cut-copy-paste are sequencer standards — commands provided by programmers as program options. With a finite set of connection rules, a field of possibilities is generated in which machines process in a self-confident manner. Screen music is produced; the reference that the image testifies to the sound is optional — it could always be different. But for a long time the surface has no longer shown pictures: it shows models. Music cuts off the aesthetic connotation and becomes purely operative. Only this way can music grow metastatically. Clicks and cuts are its symptoms: omnipresent, without reference. Here one hears the in-between, the leap that connects loops, the transitions. Even where clicks simulate the essence of the metre — the continuous beat — they are always more phrase than metrum; the predictable order of emphasis gives way to a permanent shift of emphasis. Clicks and cuts are conjunctions as permanent ecstasy — and… and… and… — they refer to something else. Their medial implication is permanent connectability. They work without context, maintaining openness precisely because of readiness to form couplings at potential musical events.
Clicks and Cuts function as the “either or” or perhaps also as the “other.” Their vagueness is the vagueness of digital media, represented in the computer’s trivalent topology. In the binary logic of connections there is not only on and off, but also the switch that transfers connection states. It is the non-representable symbol, the medium or Ab-Ort, that makes the one and the zero state possible. Clicks and Cuts: everywhere connections, shifts, transfers, transductions, trans… Interface politics and music mutate into transfer politics and music. The concept of the “inter,” which maintains the separation between human and machine, disappears in the proliferation of transactions where the artist’s authority neither acts nor navigates interactively. It is connected with its subjected machine components and with the technological components of the machine, and so steps into processes. Only in browsing do entanglements of loose elements into fixed couplings still work, if differences are made: the musician watches and clicks. The mouse click is the disturbance that excites the nerve cells. This disturbance remains equal in intensity or changes by beats. According to Heinz von Foerster, clicks constitute the vocabulary of neurons. Disturbances from outside reproduce as electrical impulses along nerve fibres. If a micros sonde near an axon is connected to loudspeakers via amplifier, the disturbances are heard as
clicks. But, in Foerster’s view, the physical cause of the excitement is not included in the nerve cell actions — only the intensity of the disturbance that provoked its action. Signals carried to the brain reveal neither a colour nor a sound, only a click. Clicks express neither meanings nor essences but only intensity and connections. The perception of a sound or a colour assigns meaning to neuronal processes that are themselves meaningless; it constructs and interprets, continuously referring to complex neuronal states.
In the coupling and decoupling of musical forms, in evaluation, the artist’s authority discovers a superficial place that is exposed to permanent variation by time-space constellations of medial imperatives. Music no longer generates its forms out of itself, but out of elements of all systems. Music becomes graphic, becomes information; politics makes music, music videos make music, hacking becomes music, etc. Everything works without soiling, in the madness of machine connection, semantics, and stratagems. The work becomes a network.
At a moment when the internet boom is weakening and electronic music oscillates between offline production, internet publication, and MP3 file sharing, one is very far from producing “network sounds” or processing immanent network music that is operationalised, distributed, and exchanged on the internet. MP3 satisfies only the collector’s passion. In the future, data-file packages will be saved less on one’s own hard drive and will instead be available only on the internet. The crucial point will no longer be copying, but the technological modes of access. Streaming.
What oral communication, as a permanent flow of feedback, naturally implies seems to be reintroduced in so-called “telematic interactivity” within the technological complex of mass media, which is characterised by partiality and one-way communication. New technologies allow one to manipulate and transform texts and non-existent objects as if they were real objects. However, they are real virtual objects. They lose the fictional status they would have under mass media, but their status is completely different from that of oral communication. Receiver and sender remain separate; the user has a certain relation to machines that neither communicate nor produce any kind of significance. The output of a machine depends on its internal program routines; the process of reciprocal understanding follows a different logic than oral communication. Without referring to the recursivity and triviality of computers, Guattari attributed a proto-subjectivity to the machine. Connecting this proto-subjectivity with human subjectivity components cannot be compared to models of oral communication or oral interaction. The history of transcriptions and translations is rather a history of transactions than of interactions. The independence of the poles — non-intentional subjects and objects — becomes less important compared to the different modes of connection. The liquefaction of musical material, digitally coded in network music, renders any neo-Adornian discussion on material matters obsolete. Instantaneous data processing points to the superficiality of the work, to its multiplication in edits, re-edits, versions, variables, remixes, postponements, etc. The data packages are temporalised; their permutation is allocated to a code that provides connectability and compatibility of operations.
In tele-topological networks, computer music is processed by meaning and sense-effects only within the options connectable or non-connectable. Then every track is more a temporary interruption of the ability to be connected than a fixed regular work. As a result, permanent innovation is required in the form of questioning the track for the options of external connections. Music, as a system of relations, produces the mental in new ways and activates patterns to perceive music and bring up meaning from the outside. Simultaneously, media systems in networks magnify not sense-effects, but sense-destruction: meaningless carriers of meaning. Music is open to meaning. Where machines transfer news and signals that are always already information of other machines, meanings are immediately encoded parts as spaces of the different kinds of information from one another.
With a momentary allocation, in the interruption of accelerations, the musical reformation of material raises the question: how can we move from the problem of the physical term “material” to the problem of a program-controlled transformation of the material? Program control that first generates the material in transjunction with subjective components. Returning to a main stream of electronic music, minimalism — which makes microscopic reductions, invents very simple patterns that are repeated and varied —
— had to be given up in favour of super-contextualisation, in favour of producing polyvalent structures. This, too, corresponds to the formations of the medial, because, with respect to media, form is always given only as a reference horizon to other forms. It always actualises itself in its connectability while the medium remains virtually present.