Philosophy

Body - Sound - Interconnection
A prehistoric aesthetic concept
as an interface for the future of social reality

Anthropological theories regard music as a cultural transformation of voiced emotion (Knepler) or of expressive behaviour (Blacking). The cultural process is said to be a development based on symbolic systems and the creation of artificial realities using signs (Cassirer). These premises describe music as a mediating phenomenon: music is the instrumentalization and mediation of emotional expression whose pre- and paralinguistic character is communicative on an intuitive level.

The instrumentalization of expressional behaviour itself becomes the process of movement and method of playing an instrument. The transience of sound is preserved in the neume, in the graphically notated record which serves as a set of instructions for the gesticulative operational movement of playing in order to execute or produce a melody.
This expressive instructional method can be seen as melodic contours in the standard notated and graphic scores generally used today, and in a more general form in "sentics" (Clynes). These are codes which - in contrast to linguistic signs - do not represent emotional qualities as images or iconic portrayal but which have an immediate presentational function, in and of themselves (Langer): feeling presented as a shape. If this image-based understanding follows the notions of a disembodied culture, then the effective psychological aspect of form representing feeling and of sound, as instrumentalized emotional expression, evoking feelings in the recipient / listener, can be seen as a process of stimulation. Acoustic driving (Harrer) is - assuming that the recipient is able to reaction and the stimulus is sufficiently intense - the immediate physiological stimulation through the dynamic elements of sound, which can in turn be seen as the result of the stimulation of a given producer: "making music is a communicative way of playing with stimuli", and music itself is the objectification of this game in the "we" form. (Adorno)

This way of thinking corresponds on the one hand to a holistic definition of sound beyond the coded notation of single parameters and on the other hand it demonstrates a way of overcoming and superseding the notion of culture as something created by disembodied codes.

The musical avant-garde of the 20th century worked towards this understanding. The movement saw a shift in importance moving away from the idea of structure in sound and towards the notion of sound structure, thus also overcoming the code system related solely to the parameters of sound. The movement also saw a return to immediate, physical processes of sound production and minimally mediated forms of music. These music-generating models of sound production entered other art forms as immediately performative structures. V. Globokar's aesthetic considerations behind his work cycle "Mein Körper ist eine Posaune geworden" ("My Body has become a Trombone"), A. Rainer's approach as applied in his Body Paintings as a formative process emerging directly from bodily stimulation, as intermedial transposition and as a method of conveying music-making behaviour in the context of visual arts, are notions that were not only realized but also popularized by J. Hendrix in his body-regulated play with feedback. It was ultimately pop music that realized the notions of bodily music making and of bodily reception of music on a large scale.

Technical developments, above all the disembodied digital representation of sound, at first fed into the idealistic illusion of disembodied art. The sorting of codes soon demonstrated the fact that algorithms ultimately function once our bodies have internalized experiences in the context of our given environment, and that we ultimately think in a mechanical way (Levy). Digital culture is no longer dualistic, rather, it is becoming increasingly characterized by the exchange between bodily human nature and the disembodied culture of coded worlds; codes, ultimately, are shaped by and through a fundamentally intuitive approach in the context of worlds made up of codes. Such immersive interfaces and the process of creative interaction are directly influenced by modes of instrumentalizing emotional expressive behaviour and the communicative effects of such behaviour, which is to say they are shaped by a (collective) musical behaviour in the most basic sense. The creation of virtual worlds in the context of a tension-driven game played with codes corresponds to Schenkers Ursatz (the notion of fundamental structures in music).

What Baudrillard describes as the body growing useless is a physical transgression from a mechanical to hedonistic body.

If mechanical imageries gleaned from experiences of physical interaction with a material environment are also instrumentalized in an attempt to shape music as an immaterial and absolute body, then this shaping occurs in a chain of tension and relaxation according to hedonistic principles which define music according to a mechanical world image, in contrast to other, analogue, portraying and visual art forms or to language as a random system of symbols. This specificity makes it an ideal subject and basis for a theory pertaining to media art. This specificity also makes it predestined to become a popular cultural form. In digital art, the art of the common digit, media art meets popular art. Day-to-day life in the digital culture is musical and necessarily hedonistic: digital culture = popular culture. These aesthetic shifts are inherently linked to political shifts.

The cultural development towards the body is simultaneously a movement against the anti-physical, idealistic world of artificiality and against a defining and establishing bourgeois tendency to categorize, limit and equate artistic beauty to the overcoming of natural beauty, whereby it is worth noting that artistic activity always functioned for the bourgeoisie as an integral part of structuring society according to artificial hierarchies. Hierarchic social orders always corresponded and continue to correspond to the degree to which nature was controlled by artificiality, and the degree to which the natural body could be overcome by the artistic and crafting act of the human hand, converting these elements of cultural life to economic capital. Democratization and informalization (Browne), on the other hand, are linked to an individual liberation, which recognizes hedonistically motivated actions on "mille plateaux" as an act of self-organizing political structuring.

Univ. Prof. Dr. Werner Jauk, Institut für Musikwissenschaft,
Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz