Structure and Materiality
At a micro level, we might understand texture in terms of structure. The notion of texture, which I understand to be a fundamental aspect of Cox and Voegelin’s conceptualization of materiality, relates in part to the number of discrete sound events within a given time frame. Texture can be relatively dense or light, busy or quiet, crowded or sparse. Texture might also relate to the range of different qualities or types of sound, in that sonic materiality can be relatively complex or uniform. This notion of texture readily aligns with a notion of materiality that focuses on the materials through which and within which sound is transmitted – which is to say, the materiality of the source. For example, in the crackle of vinyl, we have a physical encounter between the turntable stylus and the moving surface of the vinyl record. The continuous sound that results from the friction between these two surfaces is interspersed with the intermittent sounds produced when the stylus encounters the damaged wall of a recording groove or particles of dirt. These forms of friction, erosion, and deposition are vinyl’s sonic materiality, heard and understood as texture.
Zooming out from this micro level, the idea of structure as materiality might also relate to sound’s flux and flow. There is perhaps a tendency within some discourses on sonic materialism to naturalize the notions of sound’s flow and flux, particularly evident in the focus on environmental sound and environmental listening within the literature. This is understandable within a project inspired by New Materialism, or at least in tune with it. That is, the naturalization of flux and flow, as aspects of sound’s materiality, places sound at a distance from the listening subject, even when the sounds being heard are created by humans. At the same time, this naturalization stresses sound’s self-authoring and self-organizing capacities. In this way, Voegelin proposes that sounds “invisibly and inexhaustibly generate the texture of the world” (Voegelin 2019: 563). The naturalist impulse in Voegelin’s sonic materialism is particularly articulated through the notion of formlessness. Thus, in relation to the experience of listening to the multiplicity of sounds in her apartment – cars outside, fingers typing, clock ticking – Voegelin comments, “there is no sense of a form, but only mobile and invisible formlessness” (Voegelin 2019: 563). Here, it is the unstructuredness of sound that appears to characterize flow as materiality.
However, the concept of flow also accommodates highly structured sonic experiences – for example, in works of sonic art that draw on montage as a structural device rather than forms of continuity, such as John Oswald’s plunderphonics pieces. In this work, the succession of sounds of extremely short duration can also be understood to constitute the flux and flow of sound. Returning to the formulation of materiality proposed in Structural/Materialist film, in which duration enables structure (and vice versa), the editedness, the put-togetherness, the constructedness of recorded sound might also be considered part of its materiality. The equivalent in visual arts might be collage, for example in Paula do Prado’s Odalisque series (2014). Here the materiality of the work resides not just in the material nature of the watercolor, beading, embroidery, and pieces fabric that are applied to digital prints but also in the work’s material hybridity and put-togetherness.
What texture and flow also suggest, as structural forms, is the idea that materiality and culture are deeply intertwined. Texture signifies, in the sense that rough and smooth are not only tactile qualities but also values. At the same time, texture might be considered an affect in the terms proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. In What Is Philosophy?, they write, “it is difficult to say where in fact the material ends and sensation begins” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 166). Here the proposition is that affect cannot be disentangled from the material events and assemblages that generate sensory response: “Harmonies are affects. Consonance and dissonance, harmonies of tone or color, are affects of music or painting” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164). This quotation brings us back to Cox's discussion of sound as a flux, whose components move at varying speeds and with different intensities, creating complex relationships characterized by “simultaneity, interference, conflict, concord, and parallelism” (Cox 2011: 155). Here, we observe something like a meeting of old and new materialisms, in which flow and flux can be understood in both ontological and cultural terms.