Research Catalogue

Starting from the knowledge that the perception, experience and creation of music is always a bodily activity, the exposition explores the influential and intrusive power of musical ‘groove’. Whereas the concept of groove has been extensively discussed both as a general phenomenon and from the perspective of the listener, the exposition looks at the ways in which groove can specifically affect and influence the performers during a musical performance. Interested in testing whether groove can constitute an infringement of the performers’ bodily autonomy, and thereby influence their interaction, the exposition introduces the composition Moving to Become Better, a piece of practice-based research designed to explore the connections between the mutual influences of groove and the performance of musicians.

At home, whether in the study or in the bedroom; outside, while shopping or jogging; at a dance event or in a gym – we are always surrounded by sounds. Sounds of (background) music, sounds of sirens, the silent drone of a PC, buzzing mosquitoes during a sultry night, sounds of neighbors, footsteps at the front door of my dwelling, sounds produced by my body. Accidental sounds or results from sound design; disturbing or pleasant sounds; attracting attention or registered (almost) unconsciously … This essay consists of 15 short reflections on sounds in our everyday life, sounds which were topical while working on this contribution. A kind of sonic diary.

Editorial: Sound Studies and Politics

Sound as/in/on Culture

The Dominant Eye is a sixteen week project that aims to uncover why there is a heirachy of the visual sense whilst establishing strategies to re-engage with our forgotten senses. Through a series of weekly radio discussions, members from The Noematic Collective will build on a dialogue with speakers to form a manifesto towards an equality of the senses. Speakers will include sound theorists, artists, architects and specialist researchers whom deal with the beaurocracy of the senses that has been established by modernist thinkers like Art Critic Clement Greenberg.

Long ago, the mice held a council to discuss how to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. The mice knew that the Cat was sly and that she always approached them quietly, and they were frightened by these sudden encounters. After long discussions, one young and enthusiastic mouse raised his hand and proposed: “All we need is a sign that the Cat is around,” and continued, “Let’s fasten a bell round the neck of the Cat. This way, we’ll be warned by the jingling sound and have enough time to reach our holes before the Cat reaches us.” This proposal was met with cheers, until an old skeptical mouse asked, “But, who is to bell the Cat?”

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, theorizing about sound must be like running about interior design. It would be useless, a hopeless endeavor that would not lead to any insight into the phenomenon under analysis. Nevertheless, stubborn as we are, we are convinced that it is possible, and even necessary, to attempt to articulate, through language as well as through other means, sound and sonic encounters in all their diversities.

According to Bernie Krause snow creates a distinct acoustic environment, one that is as capricious in range as are the conditions under which snow occurs (Krause 2012, 47). Just as the acoustic characteristics of snow are heterogeneous and variable, so are its semantics and the psychoacoustic level on which its sounds can be described. When we woke up on the morning of December 7, 2012, we were not very happy with the view of an immaculately white urban landscape nor with its accompanying specific, dampened, snowy silence. On that date we, the editors of the Journal of Sonic Studies (JSS), were supposed to host some 25 Dutch sound experts in the center for contemporary art in Leiden, Scheltema, and snow would imply that some of them would not be able to make it to Leiden due to train cancellations.

Sound examples for Improvising Touch

Table of contents JSS issues

JSS Book reviews

Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies

My first RC exposition

My second exposition

Vincent Meelberg (Chair) / Edward Campbell / Pascale Criton / Brian Hulse / Martin Scherzinger / Deborah Walker Day 3, 11 November, Orpheus Concert Hall, 16:30-18:30 Already in 1969, thinking about extra temporality of the event, and inspired by the Stoics, Deleuze rehabilitated for contemporary thought the distinction between Chronos and Aion. Introducing an outside of time into the inner fabric of time itself, Deleuze argued for a chronology that is derived from the event—the event being the singularity that originates any given chronology. For a musician, for someone permanently involved in the radical here and now of the performative moment or compositional decision, Deleuze’s argumentation seems completely logical, even if paradoxical. Later, in collaboration with Guattari and particularly in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze further developed notions of time that are seminally related to Pierre Boulez’s concepts of the smooth and the striated: (1) the non-pulsed and the pulsed flow of musical time, and (2) the continuum or the discontinuum of musical spaces. Boulezian dualisms, like Deleuzian ones, are meant neither as oppositions nor as dialectical pairs; more creatively, they refer simply to attractors, which might be activated or not, according to different actualisations of forces. The combat of Chronos and Aion is, therefore, not to be seen as a fight between opponents, but rather as lightings, as bidirectional discharges of power between two fields loaded with differential energy. For this dialogue, the combat of Chronos and Aion is taken both as an initiator to the discussion and as a pars pro toto in terms of possible relations between Deleuze and musical practices: How and to what extent can the work of Gilles Deleuze contribute to or enhance new understandings of music? How can it be used reflexively and productively? Is there a new music after Deleuze, a new musicology after Deleuze, a new performer after Deleuze, a new listener after Deleuze? This dialogue is born out of a public dissensus: Brian Hulse’s review (Deleuze Studies Journal 9 [1]) of Edward Campbell’s book Music after Deleuze (2013), and Edward Campbell’s response to Hulse’s review (Deleuze Studies 9 [1]), a debate that makes reference to some texts by Martin Scherzinger and a debate that was published at a time when Martin was a visiting research fellow at the Orpheus Institute (February 2015). In a slightly provocative gesture, but in the sense of enabling a richer debate on Deleuze and music we decided to invite all parts and have a productive dialogue on music before, after, with, or without Deleuze.

Vincent Meelberg | Radboud University Nijmegen, NL, and Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden and The Hague, NL Day 3, 11 November, Orpheus Auditorium, 9:30-10:00 Musical performance is an encounter. It is an encounter between sounds, bodies—both human and otherwise—and ideas. All these actants are affected by this encounter, just as the encounter itself is influenced by the actants involved. Consequently, this encounter co-determines how the performance will continue. Put differently, an encounter is disruptive: it disturbs the actants’ state of rest and incites them into action, into doing something that they did not intend to do before the encounter. Gilles Deleuze suggests that disruptive encounters between bodies, objects, sensations, and thoughts can be conceptualised in ethical terms. He asserts that bodies and thoughts can be defined as capacities for affecting and being affected. For Deleuze, ethics is the study of the relations of speed and slowness, of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterise each thing. These things can be anything: an animal, a body of sounds, a mind, or an idea. According to Deleuze, this amounts to an ethics of joy, in which the production of joy is a positive expansion of affective capacity, while sadness is a negative stagnation of feeling. In my presentation I will propose that a musical performance, being a disruptive encounter itself, also always has an ethical dimension. Through an analysis of a performance by my free improv trio Molloy, I will argue that musical performance is an act that infringes the autonomy of the performers, instruments, and sonic bodies. Because of its intrusive nature, it is a performance that influences the capacity of these bodies to undergo joy. I will analyse the recording of a collective improvisation by Molloy as well as my own and my fellow band members’ impressions of this performance, using autoethnography and interpretative phenomenological analysis. In this investigation I will focus on interaction: interaction between performers, performers and instruments, sounds and performers, sounds and instruments, and so on, and the manners in which these interactions contribute to the improvisation as it develops during performance. As these interactions are responsible for the infringements on the autonomy of all actants, human and non-human, that are involved in the performance considered as encounter, a proper examination of these interactions may lead to a greater understanding of what musical performance is, or can be. My aim is to demonstrate the productivity of Deleuze’s theory of ethics in the analysis of musical performance. Following authors such as Suzan Kozel (2007) and Anthony Uhlmann (2009, 2011), and building on the ideas I introduced in Meelberg (2011), I will argue that interaction is the core of those encounters we call performance, and that Deleuzian ethics is able to articulate the specificity of the interactions that constitute a performance. Conversely, I will suggest that musical performance may be a very productive means to teach us what ethics is really about. It is about the way we human subjects deal with encounters between bodies, ideas, sounds, and minds, and vice versa.