Cognitive Penetrability of "Auditory Phenomenology"

Cool illusion illustrates cognitive penetrability of audio phenomenology http://t.co/t8UfTL0dbr — SpaceTimeMind (@spacetimemind99) June 26, 2014 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Realism, Indeterminacy and the Eye of the Mind

Epistemic indeterminacy concerns our representations of things rather than things. Thus the location of a mobile phone with a nokia ring tone may be represented as indeterminate between your pocket and your neighbor’s handbag. This epistemic indeterminacy is resolvable through the acquisition of new information: here, by examining the two containers. By contrast metaphysical indeterminacy […]

Graham Harman and Semiconductor at Cafe Oto

Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) will be presenting a sound art piece using aggregated seismic data from around the world at Cafe Oto in London, Thursday 15 November (A new venue to me, but after a look at their website I’m intending to be a habitué). Also on are computer music artist Valentina Vuksic and […]

Kundera on Xenakis

Milan Kundera perfectly encapsulates what is great about Xenakis: Even being a “prophet of unfeelingness,” Joyce was able to remain a novelist; Xenakis, on the other hand, had to leave music. His innovation was different in nature from that of Debussy or of Schoenberg. Those two never lost their ties to the history of music, […]

Microsound and Time

In Splice, Freeze, Stretch and Mutate: Digital rhythm as harbinger of the event  Eleni Ikoniadou asks if the manipulation of microsound in granular synthesis reveals a “rhythmic time” below the level of our awareness of temporal succession. More microsound here!

Metaphysical Indeterminacy with Laurie Anderson

  Laurie Anderson’s elegant proposal for a sound installation in which the audience’s own body is used simultaneously as conductive medium and speaker nicely illustrates a problem confronting the Located Event theory of sound (LET – See Roden 2010 – web published version here). LET comes in two flavors. The first, due to Robert Casati […]

Radical Computer Music

SYGNOK & The War For Radical Computer Music Here’s intriguing extract from a film about Gæoudjiparl van den Dobbelsteen, originator of Radical Computer Music. RCM is not merely made with computers but designed for computers; or, more specifically, for prospective artificial intelligences/life forms that do not currently exist. I need to research this further. RCM […]

Xenakis: Ontology

In ‘God and the Puppet’ Jean-François Lyotard claims with some plausibility that the musical identity of a sound or phrase is ‘allusive’ and subject to the free play of imagination, whereas judgements about the acoustic properties of sound (e.g. pitch, spectral composition in the frequency domain, envelope, etc.) are entirely matters of determinate judgement: One does […]

Sound: A Case Study in Slack Metaphysics ?

Some metaphysical truth claims seem undetermined by all the  naturalistic considerations we can adduce in their favour. Does this imply that the ultimate metaphysical facts are fixed pragmatically by our choice of conceptual scheme or ideology? Or are cases of underdetermination symptomatic of a deeper problem with the  idioms and methodologies used in naturalistic metaphysics. Here’s an […]

Timbre, Repetition and the Thickness of Sound

Here is a so-far unpublished musing on Jean-Francois Lyotard’s writings on music in The Inhuman. At some point, no doubt, I will be revising it in the light of my published work on computer music and the analytic metaphysics of sound (See  Roden 2010). In the meantime, I’m interested in hearing from anyone who thinks […]