Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience (Theory Out Of Bounds) [Paperback]

Aden Evens (Author)

Book Description

Series: Theory Out Of Bounds | Publication Date: June 26, 2005

As people from record collectors to file swappers know, the experience of music - making it, marketing it, listening to it - relies heavily on technology. From the viola that amplifies the vibrations of a string to the CD player that turns digital bits into varying voltage, music and technology are deeply intertwined. What was gained - or lost - when compact discs replaced vinyl as the mass-market medium? What unique creative input does the musician bring to the music, and what contribution is made by the instrument? Do digital synthesizers offer unlimited range of sonic potential, or do their push-button interfaces and acoustical models lead to cookie-cutter productions? Through this interrogation of sound and technology, Aden Evens provides an acute consideration of how music becomes sensible, advancing original variations on the themes of creativity and habit, analog and digital technologies, and improvisation and repetition. Evens elegantly and forcefully dissects the paradoxes of digital culture and reveals how technology has profound implications for the phenomenology of art. Sound Ideas reinvents the philosophy of music in a way that encompasses traditional aspects of musicology, avant-garde explorations of music's relation to noise and silence, and the consequences of digitization.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

As people from record collectors to file swappers know, the experience of music - making it, marketing it, listening to it - relies heavily on technology. From the viola that amplifies the vibrations of a string to the CD player that turns digital bits into varying voltage, music and technology are deeply intertwined. What was gained - or lost - when compact discs replaced vinyl as the mass-market medium? What unique creative input does the musician bring to the music, and what contribution is made by the instrument? Do digital synthesizers offer unlimited range of sonic potential, or do their push-button interfaces and acoustical models lead to cookie-cutter productions? Through this interrogation of sound and technology, Aden Evens provides an acute consideration of how music becomes sensible, advancing original variations on the themes of creativity and habit, analog and digital technologies, and improvisation and repetition. Evens elegantly and forcefully dissects the paradoxes of digital culture and reveals how technology has profound implications for the phenomenology of art. Sound Ideas reinvents the philosophy of music in a way that encompasses traditional aspects of musicology, avant-garde explorations of music's relation to noise and silence, and the consequences of digitization.

About the Author

Aden Evens is assistant professor of technical communication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a musician.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (June 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081664537X
• ISBN-13: 978-0816645374
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,903,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fascinating and broad ranging, July 18, 2005

By 

Jim Franzen (Fort Collins, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience (Theory Out Of Bounds) (Paperback)

Highly recommended to those interested in social theory from an interdisciplinary approach. His topic is the improvisatory element that is present in all genres of music performed by humans. But he uses that model to help us consider human action, agency, and knowledge in a much wider arena.

There is much here; from an introduction to the physics and neurophysics of noise, sound, and music to an exploration of virtual reality and media theory, the questionable basis of audiophile absolutism, comments on the man/machine interface which explore the notion of the machine as mediating device versus instrument, and more.

This is a wide-ranging exploration of epistemology, Deleuze and his reading of Kant's faculties and how Kant's non-critical approach to the faculties binds them to common sense. (See Deleuze's monograph, Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Also Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Critical Readers); especially the intro by Paul Patton and the chapter by Daniel W. Smith.)

I would have liked to have seen more from Evens on the nature of the musical score and its relationships to the modern or postmodern notion of the text, although he does a good job of clarifying the difference between the musical score and the performed sonic event as timbre. He cites the work by Jean-Charles Francois which is excellent in this regard.

He does speak to agency and the author/composer site, but I would be interested to hear more about how his ideas fit with the Foucault/Derrida/Searle notion of the concept of the author, the relationships between the roles of performer and audience in music, the role of the reader in text theory, reader response theory, Burke, etc.

His explication of Kant and Deleuze's reading of Kant is very good. (Deleuze said he liked to read earlier philosophers as though he came at them from behind and in this act created new monsters.) Good bibliography for further reading.

He cites Stockhausen: "the more we go into the microcosm, the more we have to describe what we are observing in terms of the tools we are using." On another axis, the more we go into the silos of knowledge, the more we have to rely on 'experts' and the more the philosophy of science replaces epistemology, or perhaps we should say that knowledge is now legitimated by scientists not philosophers.

Evens speaks to the notion of 'high' art and the role of elite criticism in this regard, echoing the power/knowledge lessons from Foucault.

Terrific book and very Deleuzian in that it creates new concepts. Given the nature of improvisation inherent in all human performance, how does this relate to other notions of improvisation as autonomous action governed by dispositions as Bourdieu's habitus or the other register of constitutive performativity of Austin, as it was expanded by Derrida and Butler into the constitution of identity?