It’s kind of like that Mark Fisher quote where he’s like, “It’s almost easier to imagine death than life post-capitalism.” Something like that. If you can’t hear the present and you can’t hear the future, how can you imagine anything other than what you’ve had in the past. I think music plays a really big part in creating a vision or momentum towards human development. Maybe that’s really idealistic, but…
-Holly Herndon
Our background as television viewers has conditioned us to expect that things on screens change dramatically and in a significant temporal sequence, and has therefore reinforced a rigid relationship between viewer and screen – you sit still and it moves. I am interested in a type of work which does not necessarily suggest this relationship: a more steady-state image-based work which one can look at and walk away from as one would a painting: it sits still and you move.
BRIAN ENO, 1984
“Again, it’s just the music. Feeling like transposed time is as tangible as a dream you’ve mixed up with an actual memory” (C Monster on American Zen, 2016).
“All sound is the invisible in the form of a piercer of envelopes. Whether it be bodies, rooms, apartments, castles, fortified cities. Immaterial, it breaks all barriers. . . . Hearing is not like seeing. What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains, can be rendered immediately inaccessible by walls. What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls. . . . Sound rushes in. It violates.
Lily Hirsch’s “Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment” (Michigan) explores how divergences in taste can be exploited for purposes of social control. In 1985, the managers of a number of 7-Eleven stores in British Columbia began playing classical and easy-listening music in their parking lots to drive away loitering teen-agers. The idea was that young people would find such a soundtrack insufferably uncool. The 7-Eleven company then applied this practice across North America, and it soon spread to other commercial spaces. To the chagrin of many classical-music fans, especially the lonely younger ones, it seems to work. This is an inversion of the concept of Muzak, which was invented to give a pleasant sonic veneer to public settings. Here instrumental music becomes a repellent.”
‘…here’s a sound that I can’t hear. It’s a high-frequency, around 17.4 kHz. I can’t hear it because that frequency of sound (and anything above it) is typically only audible to people under 25. It’s the result of a phenomenon called presbycusis, a term used for this progressive, age-related form of hearing loss.
In 2005, Howard Stapleton adopted this frequency for an invention he called The Mosquito, an ultrasonic alarm designed to “disperse unwanted youth gatherings” and “combat vandalism,” as the company puts it. Because the sound is only audible to those under 25, UK business owners — including even McDonald’s — can flick on The Mosquito alarm to repel potential vandals while retaining the patronage of the 25+ crowd who can’t hear it. Adults are sneaky fucks.’
“Some have argued that the ways in which the design of software structures human cognitive processes can have a detrimental effect on performance. For example, criticism has been directed at the way Microsoft’s successful PowerPoint application has shaped the rules of giving presentations, encouraging a dull linearity of bullet-pointed texted over deeper, more discursive talks; the software overtly focuses the audience on the presentation format and not its content.
…
In the network age, information (music included) has become musicalized, which is to say, the appearance of information (here, music) is more a spectacle than the musical content itself.”
Andrew Feenberg writes that “human beings can only act on a system to which they themselves belong. This is the practical consequence of being an embodied being. Every one of our interventions returns to us in some form as a feedback from our objects.”
the ability to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing,”
“meeting someone is God’s doing but parting is what humans do themselves”