The Politics of Sound and the Biopolitics of Music: Weaving together sound-making, irreducible listening, and the physical and cultural environment

• Published in: Organised sound : an international journal of music technology 2015-12, Vol.20 (3), p.278-289
• Main Author: Di Scipio, Agostino
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Culture; Humanities and Social Sciences; Ideology; Music; Musicology and performing arts; Ontology; Sound
• ISSN: 1355-7718; 1469-8153
• DOI: 10.1017/S1355771815000205

The ever-increasing focus on sound in recent creative practices has ideological implications and seems to reframe and problematise ontological perspectives on music. Today it is possible to contrast notions of music as identical with sound (as in the discursive framework of ‘audio culture’) with artistic practices where sound and music are not at all identical, and the usually implicit hierarchy between them is probably twisted. This article discusses such matters from a methodological position that weaves together issues usually discussed in different areas of concern: it understands ecologically informed notions of sound and auditory experience as strictly intertwined with critical and inventive attitudes on technology, particularly as their intertwining is elaborated through performative practices. It suggests that, in music as well as in sound art, what we hear as sound and in sound is the dynamics of an ecology of situated and mediated actions, as a process that binds together (1) human beings (practitioners and listeners, their auditory inclinations), (2) technical agencies (the domain where means and ends are dialectically negotiated as practitioners strive to achieve a certain freedom in action across the public space of technological mediations and delegations) and (3) the environment (the physical and cultural context where sound-making and listening practices take place). The general idea is that the manners by which we shape up our relationship to sound and appropriate the technical mediations involved in working with it, are of biopolitical relevance for social endeavours that might (still) be ‘music’