Skewed Remote Musical Performance: Sounding Deconstruction

If the organismic technological posthumanism discussed in chapter 5 performs an intensification of the paradoxical (deconstructive) causality that it disavows, this chapter discusses an art practice—Skewed Remote Musical Performance (SRMP)—that makes this performance explicit. Moreover, this practice connects the ambivalence of deconstruction to a digital network without using visual representation. In so doing, SRMP performs a deconstruction of the organismically configured body that exists, for Hansen, abstractly and prior to sensation as such: in place of primary embodiment, then, this chapter (via SRMP) offers sonic relation. To this end, the chapter reaches beyond its grasp to articulate the sound of SRMP as a “field-mosaic” in McLuhan’s sense, indicating a paradoxical relationality as the “origin” of the terms related. In particular, the chapter’s analysis of SRMP articulates a notion of sound that reaches toward the “fieldness” of this relationality precisely by refusing to give sonic instantiations (“sounds”) primacy. In this refusal, the “fieldness” of SRMP’s sound also prevents us from registering a human organism prior to its relational status: in the digital echo chambers of SRMP, embodied organisms do not dominate their representations but rather coexist with them via complex intermediating networks. Ultimately, then, SRMP models a way in which sound disjunctively intervenes in constructions of presence and absence, opening the body to a relational play that not only moves between those two poles but also constructs them as poles even as it is constructed by them.

Accomplished through the open source software SuperCollider, SRMP consists of two remotely situated musical performers who collaborate in real time via a computer network.1 The defining characteristic of SRMP is a skewing mechanism that results in a situation in which the sounds heard in each of the two locations are markedly different from one another and specifically differ such that the details of their differences are not anticipatable or captured. For example, in the initial performance—which took place simultaneously in San Diego, California, and Victoria, British Columbia, Canada—each SRMP performer could articulate any of an array of sound files using a musical keyboard interface that allowed him to select the sample, select an effect chosen from a bank of signal processors, select the parameters of the effect, and indicate the articulation’s duration and rhythm.2

To introduce a significant difference between what was heard at the two locations, the computer randomly turned on and off a skewing mechanism that, in this case, altered which sound file was played at the remote location but did not alter the effect applied to the sample locally (see the diagram of SRMP’s signal processing). Theoretically, the skewing that is used in SRMP could be applied to any sonic parameter (or visual parameter, for that matter) that the software can recognize (which is to say, any parameter that can be digitally manipulated). In practice, the skewing used in SRMP has tended to combine a series of binary choices (i.e., whether to apply a sound effect at all; whether to substitute a randomly chosen effect for that which was remotely specified; whether to apply the effect uniformly or only to certain sound samples; whether to articulate the effected in addition to the original sample or as a substitute for it; etc.) with a continuum of dynamic specifications (i.e., how small will the “grains” in the granular processing be; to what extent is pitch shifting applied; what are the relative volumes of the processed samples to the originals; etc). This is to say that the skewing does not introduce new parameters to the performance but rather alters the sound of the parameters already included in the performance interface. Similarly, skewing has not been applied to formal compositional structures of relation in these performances but functions instead at the level of the performance itself. With all this said, the most important things to note are that skewing happens between both locations, the sound is never skewed locally, and the local performer does not know if or in what specific way the sound is skewed remotely.3 To further emphasize this skewing, SRMP is typically presented as a structured improvisation, with the specific structural parameters varied from performance to performance.4(In this sense, SRMP indicates a performance medium rather than a specific piece.5)

One of the motivating factors in SRMP’s development was a perceived need to address the problems that recordings raise for live (sonic) performance, particularly in the case of electronic instruments. That is, because recordings offer the opportunity to redo, edit, and select sound material, what does a live performance offer the audience that it cannot get from a recording, particularly since audio recording and playback technology have progressed to the point where recordings cannot necessarily be acoustically differentiated from their live counterparts?6 In the case of acoustic instruments, one answer to this challenge is that the specificities of a performance unfold relative to the “energy” of a given concert setting, a formulation that sounds vague until we remember that the physical acoustics of a space—including the changes to the acoustics that result from audience size and configuration—directly relate to the sense of timing that an instrumentalist develops. That is, a sensitive instrumentalist will intuitively adjust her playing to the feedback that she receives from both the space and the instrument she is playing, in the same way that a sensitive conversationalist will adjust her speech to a given setting or interlocutor.

However, in the case of music that is articulated through loudspeakers (and particularly music involving the use of prerecorded sound samples), this responsiveness is far less available. Specifically, predefined sounds (be they synthesized or prerecorded) include a simulated (predefined) acoustic space that is inseparable from the sound and is thus piped into the live setting and cannot be adjusted on the fly to the nuances of the space.7 As a result, musicians working with electronics often express the need for other ways of addressing the challenge of recordings, be they through shifts in theoretical focus (such as an emphasis on the social element of live performance) or shifts in concert paradigms that range from sound installation to alternate placements of loudspeakers throughout a hall to highly specified compositional approaches.

The point, then, is that the solutions that have regularly been offered as justification for live performance have tended to address this problem by shifting its content. That is, there are certainly reasons why live performance remains valuable, but these explanations do not address the underlying question of why it is valuable for live performance to be valuable in the first place. That is, why insist? Put differently, there have been numerous demonstrations of what acoustic venues have to offer over home audio but very few of what is acoustically specific to liveness itself for electronic music. If acoustic performance practice addresses this via the relation between a performer, her instrument, and the performance space, then, SRMP focuses instead on the inter- and intraperformer relations as they unfold in real time.

Ultimately, though, SRMP fails the task that it set for itself: there is no convincing reason why, from the audience’s perspective, the performers could not just mime playing their instruments while a recorded track is sounded. (Indeed, we could even say that such “miming” is a significant part of conventional performance practice because live electronic music often features prerecorded samples in some form.) However, what emerged from this goal was a realization that SRMP does offer its performers a specificity of relation that is not typically (explicitly) available, namely, a materially specified experience of disjunction (rather than an abstractly disjunctive sensation). Thus what is notable about the use of a skewing mechanism in SRMP is not only the disjunction that it introduces between the two performers but also the discrepancy that it creates between a performer’s action and the action’s sonic representation in the remote location. In each case, a different mode of deconstructive gap is figured: in the first case, the skewing might be said to deconstruct the objective presence of the piece, in the sense that it results in a literal difference between the “piece” that is produced at each location (despite their both being created through the same performance activity). As a result, the minimal difference that always exists in signifying processes—the difference of spacing and timing that Derrida terms différance—is amplified and (consequently) avowed in the performance; in the second case, the skewing makes explicit the nonidentity of each performer with his actions because the performers’ musical activities result in multiple and unpredictable results. In this, signs of the performers’ presence are accompanied by marks of their absence so that the actions are not theirs per se but rather represent a certain degree of play. In both cases, then, the work signifies a present absence that explicitly renders the piece materially contingent.

In each of these cases, SRMP performs a different articulation of the deconstructive gap, aligning with two prominent ways in which this gap has regularly been figured. What bears emphasis here, though, is the fact that these absences are performed in SRMP, which is to say that they are made present (though incompletely) through continual and reiterative significations of their absence. In this sense, what is perhaps most engaging about SRMP is the material specificity that it lends this present absence: the constitutive paradox of deconstruction does not function as an abstract category in SRMP but is instead rendered in a way that specifically and dynamically relates to the host of other factors that are active in a given moment. In short, SRMP is a profoundly practical rendering of the ambiguity that deconstruction so aptly describes.

Indeed, this trait is evidenced in the performers’ ability to develop a performance syntax with one another, despite the fact that they do not know whether (or in what ways) the remote signal is skewed.8 Thus, for example, one performance featured a precomposed formal transition that was to be indicated by the remote performer’s execution of a large expansion in the “grain size” of a sample: if the remote performer executed the gesture over a period of two to five seconds, the local performer would understand this as a cue to shift to a new, predetermined, texture; if, instead, the expansion was made over a period of nine to eleven seconds, the cue would be to a different predetermined texture. The important point, then, is that recognition of the gesture was crucial to a successful performance in this instance because the composition required this recognition to emerge as a composition: in an otherwise improvised context like the one in this example, these types of composed transitions are key formal constraints. In this case, this recognition was successfully achieved when the local performer heard a decrease in volume that was executed over one second and repeated three times because he was somehow able to recognize this as a skewed rendition of the established cue.

What is crucial in this example is that the performers’ success did not stem from their recognizing and identifying the literal sounds but rather from their listening to the “presencing” of the two modes of absence described earlier. In this sense, then, the performers in SRMP interact by listening to sounds that are not sounded, specifically hearing them as alibis for soundings that do not sound. In fact, the performance could not have succeeded if the performers had relied on their ability to recognize the literal sounds because those sounds that were preordained with formal significance were never literally audible. What SRMP affords, then, is a rendering of the play of deconstruction’s presence and absence that gives equal and simultaneous weight to each intensity, thereby continually revivifying the paradox that exists in and as the registration of meaning (in this case, musical meaning, in the sense of identifiable formal transitions).

What is performed in SRMP, then, is a particular way in which a digital technology amplifies an existing paradox such that it may be explicitly acted on. Thus SRMP unfolds the implications of this technology in two distinct registers. On one hand, the technology functions in the performance as an abstract formal category that contributes to the undermining of conventional worldviews predicated on locating “the subject of speech in the same ontological space as the speaking subject.”9 In this, Hansen’s critique is incisive and cogent and offers a model by which to understand both the importance and the limits of this critical stratum. However, what SRMP also robustly specifies—and what Hansen’s perspective neglects—is the network character of its particular technology by maintaining the deconstructive paradox as it exists in the medium of sound. That is, by necessitating an awareness of sounds that are not sounded, SRMP’s technology makes explicit the gap between literal sounds and the sonic ontology in which they exist, while simultaneously pointing to the inadequacy of an identity-based notion of presence–absence in describing what is at stake in the practice. In N. Katherine Hayles’s terminology (discussed in chapter 3), this amounts to an insistence on supplementing the continuum of presence and absence with that of pattern and randomness.10

By offering the means to explicitly perform this paradox, then, SRMP aligns with Hansen’s argument that digital technologies present an opportunity to expunge the technical gap between a subject and its externalizations and to thereby effectively replace representation in favor of a “representative function.” However, whereas for Hansen this difference moves the discourse from representing an external reality (i.e., representation) to serving to reveal the primary interiority that is projected as representation (i.e., representative function), SRMP’s decentering of the performing subjects suggests instead that this representative function is enacted via its play of representations rather than prior to it. Thus, though a grounding of representation in embodiment is indicated by the performers’ experiences—which “do not take the form of a (representational) image but rather emerge through the representative function of the data”11—the inverse is also evinced by the dependence of the performers on represented identities to exercise their agency. Again, then, SRMP suggests that sound is anterior to its literal instantiation, but only in the sense that it indicates a relationality that emerges from the latter; in this paradox, a play of representation and representative function takes place.

To elucidate this point, certain aspects of McLuhan’s analyses of the phonetic alphabet remain useful (despite Derrida’s grammatology). Specific to the argument here, McLuhan discussed how the phonetic alphabet’s division of language into vowels and consonants makes vowels a “percept without a concept” and consonants a “concept without a percept.”12 As such, the medium of the phonetic alphabet isolates the “nonsound” of a consonant in language, thus isolating a nonsound that is nonetheless heard. The point, for McLuhan, is that the formal structure of visual space—the space of presence–absence—always involves the interiorization (or suppression) of ground as a guarantee of abstract, static uniformity. That is, simultaneous to the introduction of the phonetic alphabet is the foreclosure from perception of the excess that grounds it: the introduction of an economy of language in which phonemes might be detached, manipulated, and exchanged without losing their identity sublimates the culturally specific meanings that inhere in linguistic practice.13

Literal sounds, as (visual) figurations, likewise suppress the relationality of sound so that we might think of SRMP’s “sound that isn’t sounded” as a concept without a percept. However, the crucial difference between the two media—that is, between language and sound—is that the simultaneity of SRMP’s digital technology allows sound to be acted even in the absence of its being perceived. Indeed (and paradoxically), if the disruptive force of SRMP’s skewing were less reliable at the level of perceptibility—if, for example, it introduced a perceivable lag when it was activated—the performers would be less likely to interact successfully: the disjunction that the skewing introduces into SRMP’s literal sounds must be virtually perfect (i.e., must separate the literal sounds from their provenance in a way that completely hides the act of “cutting”) to desublimate the relationality that grounds the performance (and is grounded by it). In this sense, the figurative separation that the skewing mechanism introduces into SRMP is precisely what allows the performers to act on the paradoxical sonic relation—which is both non- and hyperrepresentational—that binds them. Thus the skewing in SRMP mobilizes literal sounds as representative functions of sound rather than of an embodied subject so that the latter’s relationality is heard—if not literally foregrounded—through them. As a result, the relationality of sound that SRMP deploys does not result in a perspective that denies the specificity of the performers’ bodies (as Hansen might suggest) but rather unpacks the way in which the constraints of Hansen’s organismic technological posthumanism overdetermine the sitedness of these subjects.

In emphasizing the performers’ and computers’ relationality, SRMP’s deployment of its technology performs its specific networked materiality by deploying the difference between sound and literal sounds as an active one. In a sense, this difference is simply that between a sonic ontology and the literal sounds that populate it. Alternately, we can understand this difference through Steven Jones’s argument that in contrast to “the traditional view that sounds signify an event (i.e., the sound of something, such as that of a door opening), recording technologies . . . shift this such that [a] sound now signifies ‘the sound of something’ (rather than signifying the sound of ‘something’).”14 In a sense, then, literal sound as it is exchanged in discourse is equivalent to Jones’s “something,” whereas the discourse of sound coincides with “the sound of something.” That is, literal sounds are identifiable, whereas sound is a continual process in which these identities are understood to exist in a mediated relation with one another.15

More broadly, the distinction between literal sounds and a sonic ontology can be expressed in the claim that literal sounds are figures (i.e., “sounds”), whereas sound is the specific mode of relation that grounds them. In this way, SRMP displays the paradoxical nature of sound’s relationality, simultaneously insisting on its disjunction from literal sounds and its constitutive connection to them. In this sense, “sounds” foreclose their ground—that through which they are figured—to register themselves, but this characterization means that sound itself is not figured per se, except to the extent that it consists in the play of figures with a ground that is itself coextensive with its figurations. Put simply, sound is the medium of “sounds,” even as each literal sound registers itself as an attempt to foreclose this medium by insisting on its own specificity. More than usual, then, the word sound is the death of the thing that it describes: via a process that might be called “auresis,” literal sound freezes sound’s indeterminate motions into “sound,” or even “sound’s indeterminate motions.”

In SRMP, though, this reduction is also an expansion because it is only through its translation into discursively identifiable terms (i.e., into “sounds”) that sound’s relationality is made visceral, in the sense that it is imbued with meaning. Quite simply, the performers are able to hear—in the process of sound’s abstraction into “sounds”—the movement of literal sound’s absence into sound. Thus the crucial point is that sound is equally active in both sound and “sounds” so that the question of differentiating between the two becomes a question of registration rather than materiality. However, this distinction does not mean, as Hansen would have it, that aural space materially preexists its registration but rather that the differentiation itself is a symptom of discourse. That is, to say that a prediscursive materiality of sound cannot be distinguished from that of literal sounds is not to say that they are the same thing prior to discourse but rather that they exist precisely through their discursive correlation. As a medium, then, sound paradoxically preexists its content precisely because it also does not (and vice versa), which is to say that sound performs the irrationality of the real that Serres finds in all relation: the paradoxicality of sound and literal sound’s relation is integral (i.e., the paradox would be redoubled if the relation were not paradoxical).16

It bears noting that this is in distinct contrast to Hansen, who takes a rational precedence of the medium—the fact that the body “exists as a unified field that [logically] precedes . . . the differentiation of the senses”17—to indicate the illogic of linguistic registration, namely, the fact that language depends on something preexistent that it must disavow (i.e., in Hansen’s reading, the “primary tactility” of embodiment). As I argued in chapter 5, this claim is ironic because embodiment’s precedence is itself linguistically figured by Hansen (both literally and in its use of visual logic) and thus depends on the very logic that it denies in order to signify. In contrast, SRMP puts the constitutive illogic of language—particularly its ambivalence with respect to identity—into play as a paradox. As a result, sound (as a medium) takes logical precedence over its contents to exactly the extent that it undermines this logic: if Hansen argues for the logical precedence of a body over its senses, then, SRMP counters by performing the illogical precedence of sound over “sounds.” Put simply, SRMP does not contradict a perspective that would give embodiment primacy, except to show that such a perspective naturalizes the biases that underwrite it. In so doing, SRMP does not contrast Hansen’s attempt to hold discourse accountable to embodiment by simply reversing the scenario but rather by first holding discourse accountable to itself.

This “illogic” points to the way that sound differs from Hansen’s reading of tactility. To the extent that sound is distinguished from the visually figured “sounds” that it correlates, it closely resembles the notion of embodiment to which Hansen ascribes. Indeed, like Hansen’s understanding of primary tactility (or “infratactility”), sound is here taken to be inclusive of the other senses.18 Moreover, sound and infratactility both indicate a sensitivity that is external to the positive empirical figures of sense perception per se, and thus each indicates an unquantifiable yet specific materiality. However, by insisting on the irresolvable nature of sound’s structuring paradox, an important difference obtains (despite their similarity in content) between the ways in which these terms operate. Specifically, I have chosen sound as my grounding metaphor in this chapter for two reasons: first, in the hope of precluding any confusion with respect to its ontological priority since, unlike infratactility, sound does not lay claim to prelinguistic meaning, and second, to take advantage of the unsi(gh)tedness that characterizes both acoustic space and our everyday experiences of “sounds”—as McLuhan learned from psychologist Carl Williams (who, in turn, worked with E. A. Bott), auditory space “has no center and no margins since we hear from all directions simultaneously.”19 Unlike prototypically tactile experiences, we are frequently disoriented by sounds. In sum, the metaphor—and both sound and infratactility are metaphors—relies on a shared experience of sounds as a moment of sensation that precedes identity, in the sense that everyday experience frequently includes both (1) hearing a sound before we know its origin and (2) not hearing a sound—consciously, as a sound—because it acts as a (seemingly) neutral carrier of a signal. In both these cases, then, sound differs from tactility in its character, if not its content.20

Indeed, these characteristics of sound relate directly to the medial specificity of SRMP. Imagine, for example, an equivalent setup using video rather than audio: such a performance would have to operate via entirely different aesthetic criteria because applying a skewing mechanism to a video would act to transform the image rather than acting on the gap between the performers’ actions and the image. That is, real-time video tends either to project a subject directly (in, e.g., a video of someone or something), to represent its underlying agent via an avatar that is situated in a constrained world (as, e.g., in a video game), or to almost entirely sublimate its underlying agent (in, e.g., synthesized video of abstract, computer-generated images). In the first two instances, SRMP’s skewing would not be effective because it would be perceptible so that it would deteriorate either the realism (in the first case) or the believability of the simulated world that accompanies this claim (in the second case). In the third case, the reverse problem would adhere: the skewing might be undetectable, but this would be the case because the relation of the video to its underlying agent was not established in the first place.21 The point, then, is that sound tends to signify with a stronger ambivalence than other media with respect to the correlation of actors and their actions, in the sense that it simultaneously relies more heavily on signifiers that are detached from their alleged signifieds but also—paradoxically—takes these signifiers to be constitutively representative of something. As I noted in the introduction to this book, sound remains the conventional test of presence.

While sound offers an important specificity, though, its demarcation from other media is by no means either discrete or total; indeed, the parasitic nature of sound’s semiotics—not to mention the constitutive relationality discussed earlier—means that sound is never just sound. While skewing video would not work in precisely the same way, for example, an analogous effect might be achieved through computer animation.22 Ultimately, then, in the characterization of sound that I have offered here, I am not insisting on a hard and fast definition of sound. Rather, I am articulating a version of it that avows its necessarily metaphoric quality and thereby reminds the reader that the term is not intended to immediately indicate its object (which is not an object, in any case) but rather to instigate a language of the senses that is perhaps more suitable than conventional (visually biased) metaphors for characterizing the profound displacement that is experienced in SRMP.

In these senses, sound (as it is used here) is a more concertedly decentered metaphor than tactility, as it is understood by Hansen, and instigates a language of resonant relations in place of the latter’s grounding hierarchy. In so doing, sound aligns with the network quality that characterizes digital technologies and is particularly suited to the claims to simultaneity that have dominated the latter’s discourse. Indeed, McLuhan foresaw this connection between digitality and acoustic space in his frequent insistence on electric technology as a return of the acoustic, since the former obsolesces linear causality by acting at the speed of light.23 Moreover, it is a peculiar irony of language that acoustic metaphors describe digital networks better than visual ones, because the hypercausality of digital networks (and electric technologies) operates via this condition of visibility. All told, then, this reading suggests that acoustic space might be understood as a reversal potential of vision, a moment in which its intensification reaches the point that it flips into its opposite.

Stated differently, SRMP performs an intensification of “sounds” that pushes a figuration of sound to its full intensity such that the virtual (or skewed) “sounds” cannot be distinguished from their real counterparts. In this, the performers themselves are to an extent virtualized as agents, not in the sense of their bodies being dematerialized (either idealistically or dystopianistically), but rather in the sense that a crucial component of their agency is sited in the machine through which they relate to one another. Indeed, in a kind of acoustic trompe l’oeil, one could even suggest that the performers’ bodies act as the vanishing point of the machine’s perspectival horizon such that they are rendered performance objects of a relational network that precedes them because it exists outside of the realm of precedence (i.e., as the speed of light).24 In this, then, the performers are perhaps not so much virtualized as they are a testament to Deleuze’s observation that “it is not so much that one cannot assign the terms ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ to distinct objects, but rather that the two are indistinguishable.”25 As a result, to the extent that the performers of SRMP act in relation to the literal sounds produced, they do so within a virtual temporality consisting in a period of time “smaller than the smallest period of continuous time imaginable in one direction . . . [but] longer than the longest unit of continuous time imaginable in all directions.”26 This is the sense, then, in which SRMP constructs its performers less as agents than as a-causal resonances that perform the impossibility of a semiotics of sound per se that Shepherd and Wicke have identified: “sounds acting as a medium [are] materially involved in calling forth from people elements of signification in a manner in which sounds as signifiers do not.”27

The point, then, is that the digital technology of SRMP not only makes the constitutive paradox of meaning described by deconstruction explicit but also redoubles it in a language of technological performativity. After all, though SRMP performs a formal undecidability, such a performance nonetheless constitutes—as a performance—a kind of decision. In particular, this paradox is played out in SRMP as a radicalization of the claim that sound is inclusive of vision, showing that McLuhan fails to follow the full potential of his own thinking. That is, by arguing that “our private senses are not closed systems, but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness,”28 McLuhan suggests (like Hansen) that there exists a closed system that precedes language but nonetheless signifies.29 By contrasting this claim, then, SRMP desublimates the (normative) leap of faith that is necessary to speak sensibly of the “human.” In SRMP, then, the human “is not now, and never was, itself”30 but instead operates precisely as the disjunction that maintains this formulation.

Ultimately, then, SRMP relies on a primacy of sound over its literal instantiations that can only be understood grammatologically. In this, the primacy of sound is not an origin but the preclusion of origin through which a primary relationality is retrieved. Put differently, SRMP emphasizes the deconstructive gap by performing it in an acoustic setting, thereby sidestepping, if only for a moment, the visual dominance that has tended to shape Western culture (including “Western art music”). That is, SRMP makes deconstruction audible, and this audibility, the detritus of performance, ultimately represents the limit of sound’s registration. Amid this detritus, though, the subject that McLuhan posited as the source of technological extension has multiplied and continues to multiply. What SRMP performs, then, is not simply a deconstruction of “sound” as a positive term—or, for that matter, of embodiment as an originary and unilateral source of meaning—but rather the suggestion that artistic practices might insist on themselves as conjunctive-disjunctions–disjunctive-conjunctions: as sounds. When this is the case, the interval between subject and object, the becoming of sound, is revealed as a paradox that invests both terms.