Conclusions
A material semiotics of instruments of the kind created by these two artists cannot focus solely on the sounding properties of their materials. The sounding of Abas’s bombshell cello is clearly influenced by its origin as much as its material; other metal could be used to make a similar instrument but without the meaning-making properties that this instrument acquires prior to and in performance. Such a decision (to make a metal cello) would not have led to the performance considerations described by Abas – the need to amplify the instrument and to hold it differently – since these might easily have been designed out if the goal were only to create a metal instrument, nor could the link to her personal biography be so closely explored by a generic consideration of metal. Likewise, the premise of modularity in Underwood’s practice transcends the materials of the instrumental elements themselves, suggesting a sonic relational practice that creates a network between materials, instrumentality, and amateur-experimentation that conceives of accessibility in the widest possible terms. As well as a musical performance, his instruments sound an invitation to others to work in this way.
In both cases, the practice of instrument building widens the discussion of sonic materiality from a collaboration with an instrument’s sounding properties to its active role in a network of social relationships that are not necessarily themselves sounding but nevertheless are activated by sounding. Music Philosopher Isabella van Elferen’s consideration of the timbral sublime and timbral aesthetics has something to offer to such a discussion. She writes that “we direct our admiration to the impossibly material origin of the sound we do not want to comprehend […] and we capture that material index in icons of ineffability” (van Elferen 2020: 122). This explains how some aesthetic considerations might concurrently appear material and to be located beyond the material. Van Elferen states that “the timbral noumenon is a thing and a Thing, an object that is not an object” (van Elferen 2020: 131). The material is one lens through which these ideas might be interrogated, but through that lens the aesthetic components of these ideas are obscured. Rather, “the material” is a frame which “the aesthetic” appears to continually evade or transcend. In the video dialogue I have actualized this through the juxtaposition of artist statements and sonic statements, leaving open the possibility of further, additional, interpretations than those articulated by either me or the artists.
The concurrence of the aesthetic, intersubjective, and (sonic) material of the instruments created by Abas and Underwood therefore presents a heterogeneity: not just a network of relations but a layering of them. While the intersubjective elements of these practices might not be physically “sounded” in the sense of frequency or resonance, they are present in their sounding in a manner that transcends metaphor. Accordingly, while Campbell, in his approach to understanding materiality, argued for a plurality of method, I consider this heterogeneity to be re-articulated across moments of performance, composition, and instrument construction. Campbell suggests that such approaches present the possibility of “overcoming the possible limits of the improvisation-posthumanities conjunction” (Campbell 2021: 421); I propose that they restore the importance of phenomenological experience to an understanding of objects. Even within a posthuman understanding of materialism, it can be stated that intersubjective aesthetic propositions arise from humans even where they seek to consider an expanded or non-anthropocentric universe.
This is how I seek to propose a material understanding that is non-ideal, discontinuous, and precarious through the consideration of expanded organologies as sonic material practices. Precarity in organology is conceived within the area of practice that is removed from the standardized or professionalized sphere, as Abas described in working with a metalworker and Underwood in conceiving an acoustic modular instrument. Although sonic outcomes are described by both practitioners as sometimes intended and often pleasurable, they do not dictate the material and intersubjective relationships of these artists with their instruments, which are always prior to sounding. These relationships are therefore concurrently critical and creative, providing insight into how aesthetics can arise from non-ideal relations and how sounding materials can amplify narratives that begin from personal and musical identities and yet exceed them. This offers insight into how the political and the material may be reconciled in posthuman sonic practices.