This essay is about how artists, listeners and critics claim to hear life in a sound and how this suggestive, but hazily defined, provocation connects vast cultural circuits of production, technology ...and capital. I argue that claims to life in a sound also belie an anachronistic return to an early modern understanding of sound as particulate matter and suggest a technoscientific discourse in which sound and data are described in terms of one another. With a close engagement with microsounds - from Gilles Deleuze to computer music specialist Curtis Roads - this essay queries what sonic particulates are presumed to be when they are mapped onto Spinoza's corpora simplicissima but processed through analogy synthesis or digital tools. In part, this essay tries to speak to a persistent separation of sonic materiality and auditory culture, in music and sound studies in which life in a sound cannot be thought apart from how life is subject to different kinds of extractions. With a return to Spinoza's physics, this essay also retakes the often sloganized "no one knows what a body can do" to emphasize an ethical recomposition of the text in which to "know" must be as open-ended as "body" is typically emphasized to be.
There is a strong intuition that we can listen to works of music, yet musical ontologies on which works of music are abstract objects, perhaps most notably, type theories of music, seem to imply that ...this is impossible. This problem has received relatively little attention in the literature. I here explore and develop a solution suggested by Julian Dodd and argue that it has at least two problematic consequences, namely (i) that some works of music cannot be listened to unless one has already studied the relevant score or through a similar process learned roughly what the work requires of its performances and (ii) that it is possible for two people to listen to different musical works while listening to the same performance.
Starting from the perspectives of constructivist philosophy and process philosophy, this paper uses descriptive analysis to explore the philosophy concept of practical music education, and concludes ...that practical music philosophy is the result of the comprehensive effect of many factors in music education. On the basis of the philosophy concept of music education, combining the characteristic parameters and objective function and similarity algorithm to construct a practical music education philosophy resource recommendation model to realize the construction of practical music education philosophy in colleges and universities, and adopting the method of statistical analysis to research and analyze the practical music education philosophy in the digital era. The results show that the score of instrumental performance students (4.0431) is significantly lower than that of students of other majors, and the difference is significant, with higher humanistic literacy in art and sports and a better foundation in cultural courses. The order of correlation between the scores of emotional identity dimension and the factors influencing the work of values cultivation in the philosophy of practical music education is, in descending order, the object of education (0.499), the subject of education (0.451), the mediator of education (0.476), and the ring of education (0.287), which indicates that the object of education (college students) is the most important factor influencing the work of values cultivation in the philosophy of practical music education. The purpose of this study is to examine the meaning and significance of practical music education philosophy, which is a significant source of inspiration for music education in China today.
Bloch’s philosophy of music is one of the most interesting of the twentieth century, particularly in the context of Marxist aesthetics. This article focuses on the various peculiarities of this ...thought, which seldom are highlighted. Firstly, through a new analysis of the musical sections of Spirit of Utopia and The Principle of Hope, the relation between utopia and music will be discussed in Sections 2 and 3 in order to show the originality of Bloch’s refusal of the Marxist base-superstructure model in the field of aesthetics. In contrast to the other philosophies of music, the study of music inspires theoretical speculation in Bloch’s thought and not vice versa. In order to demonstrate this connection, in Sections 4 and 5, the idea of the sound in Spirit of Utopia will be examined and compared to the conception of the matter as it is presented in The Principle of Hope, The Materialism Problem, its History and Substance, and other works. These paragraphs aim to highlight how the early conception of sound was the model for the later conception of matter.
While institutional critique has long been an important part of artistic practice and theoretical debate in the visual arts, it has long escaped attention in the field of music. This open access ...volume assembles for the first time an array of theoretical approaches and practical examples dealing with New Music’s institutions, their critique, and their transformations. For scholars, leaders, and practitioners alike, it offers an important overview of current developments as well as theoretical reflections about New Music and its institutions today. In this way, it provides a major contribution to the debate about the present and future of contemporary music.
This text aims to discuss the following hypothesis: in the context of damaged life, songs with a claim to autonomy, which accept contradictions and what is not identical and that, therefore, have the ...potential for criticism and human formation affect the listeners and are capable of producing rejection. From the Critical Theory of the Society, it is argued that the rejection is also desirous, because we are very violently deprived of formation. Thus, it is concluded that the damaged life builds a relationship of resentment between the listeners and the music with pretensions of autonomy, which becomes dangerous in the face of the few training possibilities that remain in the contradictions
El objetivo de este texto es discutir la siguiente hipótesis: en el contexto de la vida dañada, las canciones con pretensión de autonomía, que acogen las contradicciones y lo no idéntico y que, por lo tanto, tienen potencial de crítica y formación humana, afectan a los oyentes y son capaces de producir rechazo. Desde la Teoría Crítica de la Sociedad, se discute que el rechazo es también deseoso, pues que somos muy violentamente privados de formación. Así, se concluye que la vida dañada construye una relación de resentimiento entre los oyentes y la música con pretensiones de autonomía, lo cual se pone como peligroso frente a las pocas posibilidades de formación que todavía permanecen en las contradicciones
Realism about musical works is often tied to some type of Platonism. Nominalism, which posits that musical works exist and that they are concrete objects, goes with ontological realism much less ...often than Platonism: there is a long tradition which holds human-created objects (artifacts) to be mind-dependent. Musical Platonism leads to the well-known paradox of the impossibility of creating abstract objects, and so it has been suggested that only some form of nominalism becoming dominant in the ontology of art could cause a great change in the field and open up new possibilities. This paper aims to develop a new metaontological view starting from the widely accepted claim that musical works are created. It contends that musical works must be concrete and created objects of some sort, but, nevertheless, they are mind-independent, and we should take the revisionary methodological stance. Although musical works are artifacts, what people think about them does not determine what musical works are. Musical works are similar to natural objects in the following sense: semantic externalism applies to the term ‘musical work’ because, firstly, they possess a shared nature, and, secondly, we can be mistaken about what they are.
In this paper, I address the question of how emotional qualities can be attributed to musical timbre, an acoustic feature that has proven challenging to explain using traditional accounts of musical ...emotions. I begin presenting the notion of musical expressiveness, as it has been conceived by cognitivists to account for the emotional quality of various musical elements like melody and rhythm. However, I also point out some limitations in these accounts, which hinder their ability to fully elucidate the emotional expressiveness of timbre, especially when considering it as a result of non-cognitively mediated processes. Consequently, I explore the link between timbre and atmosphere by reviewing anecdotal sources that have characterized timbre in terms of atmosphere. The goal here is to determine if these characterizations should be seen as merely allusive and metaphoric expressions or if they genuinely reveal essential properties of timbre. To achieve this goal, I delve deeper into the notion of atmosphere, and I show that it shares several key traits with the notion of musical emotions as conceived in the cognitivist’s account. Both musical emotions and atmospheres are affectively charged externalities that are apprehended by the subject without cognitive mediation. Drawing from this insight, I conclude that the notion of atmosphere can serve as a valuable tool in explaining the emotional expressivity of timbre without invoking the resemblance-based mechanisms often found in cognitive accounts of expressiveness.
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