2. A sonic epistemology

As Jacques Attali (Reference Attali1977: 12–14) states in his influential book Noise, music as a tool of knowledge is haloed by a theoretic indiscipline that troubles the modes of thinking mainly expressed through language. Part of this unruliness comes from the fact that the thoughtful dimension of music emanates from the capacity of sounds to carry sense. Accordingly, conceiving music as a mode of thought involves the formation of a sonic epistemology.

Through sound, a whole social life expresses itself in its multiplicity, so that the noises produced by/emerging from a given society constitute a type of soundtrack of the vibrations that animate it (Attali Reference Attali1977: 12). But beyond the social and even the human, sound opens onto the intertwining of movements, ambiances, gestures and actions marking the lived experience. A sonic epistemology considers not only that the acoustic ecologies are enunciative of social relations and power dynamics, but also that they tell about the way reality is lived, experienced and organised: they are expressive, in themselves. They express in the actuality of their effective manifestations as in the potentialities of the multiple meanings, narratives, rhythms and relations that emanate from them.

This implies, on a political level, that paying attention to ambient noises could allow us to grasp otherwise unperceived dimensions of politics. The buzzing of the ventilation systems of downtown buildings having taken the place of the clamour of the working-class districts, the statements transmitted by the loudspeakers in different public spaces, the construction noises imposing the concrete deployment of urban planning on every surrounding activity, etc. If, as the Invisible Committee (Comité invisible 2014: 83) underlines, the structure of contemporary power takes the form of the material, technological and physical organisation of the world, in short if power is the very order of things, this environmental order could sometimes be more perceptible in ambient noises rather than in the analysis of the explicit statements of the administration. Yet the movements of struggle are no exception to this: the uproar of a demonstrating crowd, the judicious use of loudspeakers to manifest the presence of a particular political perspective (or, in the case of counter-demonstrations, to supplant a hostile gathering), the rhythm of a marching swarm, or even intoxicated revellers who break up the nightly tranquillity of early risers in a gentrified neighbourhood. The attention to the sensible common that goes beyond formal discourses provides access to the informal field of desire that is the real motor of all movements of struggle: the various recording devices come to capture and then amplify this desire to make heard its smallest folds, the ecology of the presences that are expressed there. As the Ojibwe artist and activist Marcella Ernest (Rector and Ernest Reference Rector and Ernest2017) affirmed, ‘understanding the sonic elements of protest helps us to better understand how protest and politics is heard and felt’.

A sonic epistemology brings knowledge into a pragmatic and experimental mode, where intuitions, attention to the small details of everyday life, furtive sensations and plurivocal relationships to meaning are part of the research. In this sense, it could inspire practices of study, understood following Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (Reference Harney and Moten.2014: 110) as a speculative practice of thought driven by sensitivity to the world, emphasising the plurality and diversity of modes of reflection that populates the lived experience, and which are just as important – sometimes even more, depending on the subject of study, the context and the approach – as the recognised forms of intellectual production. This conception offers a particular understanding of the academic field labelled ‘sound studies’: at this point, two people sitting in a park and noticing that the birdsongs are more and more covered by the combined sounds of traffic and urban works act as true ‘sound students’. The elaboration of a phonosophic epistemology should never undermine this pluralistic approach which valorises the already-reflexive dimension of many daily practices, pointing to the thinking foam of what’s organising, what moves the collective even before the formal organisation begins.

3. What thinks in the sonic experience

Sound gives access to the often-unperceived senses that circulate in a given ecology: it proposes matters of knowledge of the actual world. The philosophy of process of (and inspired by) the philosopher and mathematician Alfred N. Whitehead allows us to extend this at the deepest level of the lived experience.

For Whitehead (Reference Whitehead1978: 227), hearing a sound is first and foremost a physical feeling, that is, a physical prehension of an actual occasion of experience.Footnote ³ But this hearing also always occurs as a tending towards the realisation of a conceptual feeling, which marks the qualitative difference of the event by shaping the texture of what is not actualised but is nevertheless felt. The conceptual feeling comes from the mental pole of experience, which can never be detached from the physical pole: the contrast between the two poles is where the relationship between the actual and potential nature of the vibrations that animate the deep movements of the world is played out (Manning Reference Manning2020). Because as it has been shown by many phonosophers,Footnote ⁴ quantum physics has demonstrated that the material world is movement, ‘movement of movements’, composed of extremely fast oscillations (Bergson Reference Bergson1966: 165). Reality presents itself in the form of a continuous fluctuation, driven by the periodic rhythmicity of (sub-)atomic activity: matter is in this sense intrinsically vibratory: ‘We find ourselves in a buzzing world’ (Whitehead Reference Whitehead1978: 50, 79). The sound being, in its physical reality, a vibratory movement, matter is, as such, sonic.

In fact, the mental operations related to the conceptual pole of experience allow the subject of the feeling to make some elements of its/her/his objective physical datumFootnote ⁵ consist by the (conceptual) prehension of eternal objects,Footnote ⁶ that is to say of pure potential. These conceptual prehensions are therefore essential in the sensory perception of sound, since it is the ingression (the relation/the coming-into the concrete world) of eternal objects that brings definition and nuance to what is perceived as sense-data in the experience. Indeed, although the mentality of the occasion always emerges from the material-sensitive experience, the physical data – here the measurable characteristics of a sound (frequency, intensity, etc.) – never completely determine what feels/is felt in the sonic experience (Whitehead Reference Whitehead1978: 85, 248). In other words, when a sound is perceived (and sometimes identified) as such, it is because a conceptual prehension (of an eternal object) has come to qualify and through this specify the physical sound stimulus captured by the perceptual apparatus. This means, for an epistemology of phonosophy, that every perception of a sound implies a conceptual movement, which carries a mental dimension that could become the material for another thinking practice, for a sophia.

The speculative and pragmatist philosophy of Whitehead thus allows us to perceive sound in its ecological dimension, or rather in the deep inter-relationality of the different ecologies that make it (ré)sonner as such. Yet, at some point, an entity in subjective position still has to be able to perceive these differences through experience. Because if we thus come to realise that the mental (psycho-metaphysical) and physical-organic (sensory) mechanisms of perception are inextricably linked, a conception, however abstract it may be, always starts from a (sensory) perception, as Bergson (Reference Bergson1966: 145) recalled. The importance of the mental pole in the experience of sound should therefore not obscure the fact that the actual feeling of a sonic element comes from a physical sensation, able to generate an emergent ecology.

4. Music as a thinking practice

Through conceptual prehensions, the pure potential of felt relation (eternal objects) provides a definition, but moreover adds a quality to the physical feeling of a sound (Whitehead Reference Whitehead1978: 227). This is how music is perceived from more or less clear sounds, through conceptual valuations. Perhaps this is what John Cage (Reference Cage1961: 94), who contributed eminently to the reception of the sounds of the world in Western music, foresaw when he maintained that the field of music is the mind of the listener. In Whiteheadian terms, this means that what is identified as ‘music’ comes from a perceptual experience where the mental-conceptual pole determines the qualification of the sounds actually heard, and thus their ‘musical’ dimension.

Of course, the situation becomes more complex when the perceived sound is a chord, a note in a melodic sequence, or a textural composite of noises emitted simultaneously: the same complex process of physical and mental interrelations applies nevertheless, in a game of prehensions where relations of whole/parts, of harmony/dissonance determines the sensitive experience of sound, consequently forming a more or less contrasted pattern, with varying degrees of intensity. Perhaps this is what it means to entendre the music: to perceive the rhythmic contrasts, to pay attention to the differences of tonalities, to appreciate the (dis)harmonic movement of inter-related singularities, in any situation, at various levels. Whitehead’s speculative materialism details the game of innumerable prehensions through which musical processes emerge, emphasising the deep inter-relation of mentality and physicality in every aspect of the perceived reality. This complex game is marked by a series of harmonies, bifurcations, divergences: multiple captures. Music thus consists, following Deleuze (2002: 57; Reference Deleuze1988: 111), in an operation of capture of the forces that mobilise, cut and crystallise the world. In this sense, it appears to be a concentration, an intensification of the acoustic experience by capturing the surrounding forces to sonorise them. Taking on what lingers around, what is woven below formal organisations, conventional attentions and representations: a series of micro-political captures turned towards the tiny rhythms through which the elementary movement of things is felt.Footnote ⁷

The processes of musical creation not only involve the capture of elements from their surroundings, but also organise them into new blocks of sensations. Such blocks of sensations are composed from the materials at hand, from the perceptions and affections felt in each situation, which are aggregated into percepts and affects; in short, in compositions of relations of forces that alter the way we (can) feel and perceive. But for Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1980: 363–05) it is only when these actual compositions leave their territory of emergence, when they deterritorialise from the lived actuality to trace a diagonal which crosses heterogeneous components to make them hold together, that these unheard sound blocks become new musical creations. Indeed, this take-off from the sensitive to the expressive is what allows the properly creative operation of music, and which makes the created work an event as such, having its proper life, independently from all human subjects participating in the different stages of its process (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 271, 630; Reference Deleuze and Guattari2005: 167). This is what the author and composer Hildegard Westerkamp (Reference Westerkamp2002: 52, 56) underlies when she insists on the need for a soundscape composition to be able to become a ‘new place’ from the environmental sounds from which it is (partially) derived.Footnote ⁸ And for this to happen, something has to think itself in its own process of emergence.

5. Technicity of the vibrant ecologies

The contribution of process philosophy to the thought of the musical experience leads us to consider the musical event as an ecology: each musical event is the result of a multiplicity of human and non-human agents forming an immanent agencement of productive forces, that is, an experience of trans-individual intensity associating all kinds of material, ambient, social, technical, spiritual components, and more (the instruments, their level of maintenance and reaction to the microclimate of the place, the musicians, their mood, the relationships between them, the ambiance of the room, the lighting, the size and attitude of the audience, etc.). This contingent association of disparate elements must be seen as that which creates, produces the music, and that which expresses through it (Nesbitt Reference Nesbitt, Criton and Chouvel2015: 187–9).

The quality of the expression that will emerge then depends not so much on the degree of inspiration of the soloist, the genius of the composer or the arranger, or even on the harmony of the group, but rather, it depends on the configuration of the agencement that is present, presence in which all these variables participate, with a multiplicity of others. And the importance of ‘minor’ variables in the bifurcation of the agencements should not be underestimated, since a musical agencement is subject to the tiniest changes, according to the movement of circumstances. From then on, a whole attention to the conditions of musical creation opens itself.

As ecology, the musical event arises from the contingent, ephemeral and often ambiguous encounter between multiple elements, which contribute in varying degrees to the expressive quality of the music produced. The quality of a musical performance is thus an issue of encounter between/with the different bodies (human, sonic, technological, etc.) participating in the event: attempting to provoke encounters that will compose an ensemble capable of capturing and making heard unheard forces, a more powerful agencement, able to make tremble together ‘beings’ and ‘things’. There is no relativism here: the process of musical creation requires an increase in the expressive capacities/potentialities of the ensemble, and this power of a musical agencement to affect (or be affected) comes from a fine match of a series of countless conditional factors (and, at some point, a certain margin of luck).

This requires specific techniques. Always singular, a technique is a commitment with the expressive modalities that a practice invents for itself, a (counter-)method ^{Footnote 9} of rigorous experimentation marking a specific turning point in the combination of the creative conditions which determine the quality of the experience (Manning and Massumi Reference Manning and Massumi2014: 89–91; Manning Reference Manning2013: 34). Such a combinatorial art is a question of deploying the uses ^{Footnote 10} that will allow the collective to reach the greatest margin of its expressive potential, and especially to learn about/through these uses. A technique often implies a certain level of repetition: each successive operation incorporates a part of the implicit which underlies the ecology of experimentation opening up, and this requires a patient exploration of how a practice comes better to itself (Manning Reference Manning2013: 33–5).

But one should not think that a technique is the initiative of (a) creative subject(s). As Whitehead’s process philosophy have shown, subjectivity is constituted in the very moment of subjective experience: if there is a subject of the musical creation, it is the creative process as such and only it that can really claim this title: an ecological subjectivity. This has important implications on the process of music creation, but also on the conception of politics. In both cases, the emergence of novelty does not come so much from the intervention of one of the actors involved, but rather from the abstract machine ^{Footnote 11} which catalyses the agencement in its process of expression, like a kind of thinking-motor taking on specific potentialities to make them stand out in the event. For Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1980: 126–7), collective agencement and abstract machine are not separate: in music (and in politics) there always coexists a singular abstract and a collective concrete. We can feel it particularly in moments of great musical intensity: the experiential effect then comes from the expression of a ‘coming-together of the parts [involved, and] not [from] the parts themselves or their structure’ (Massumi Reference Massumi2011: 149). At this moment, a machinic agencement is expressing itself, making feel the energetic ‘taking’ of a musical ecology. ‘No-one knows who’s playing it: maybe we all are. Perhaps it’s just playing itself. Perhaps it is playing us’ (Gilbert Reference Gilbert, Buchanan and Swiboda2004: 118): what plays then comes under a technical-machinic operation – the machinic involves a series of technical operations; it is by their technical element (their technicity ^{Footnote 12}) that the agencements become machines – which capture heterogeneous expression materials in order to associate them in a consistent manner.

One of the key modalities within the techniques of relation that comes to catalyse and modulate the interaction of the components of the musical agencement is the enabling constraint, understood, following Erin Manning (Reference Manning2013: 111), as the setting of the establishment of a series of conditions favouring a limitation of the field of experience while allowing the emerging event to remain open to invention. The concept of enabling constraint encourages the precision of techniques in an open field of experimentation, which can imply the invention of new techniques of collective alignment that go beyond the pure habit of movement (Manning and Massumi Reference Manning and Massumi2014: 91–2). Transposed in the field of improvised music, the concept of enabling constraints resonates with the one of comprovisation.

6. Résonances manifestes: a proposition of phonosophic practice

These aesthetical and epistemological considerations offer much to experiment with: and this is what Résonances manifestes (Devenir-ensemble 2020), a comprovised music piece based on a sound score composed of field recordings from various autonomous demonstrations that shook the streets of Montreal in the recent years, attempted to do. Résonances manifestes is the musical expression of a process of research-creation – at the confluence of music, philosophy and political thought – aiming to understand how sound and music contribute to the (trans)formation of affective communities, these communities in movement which do not stand on pre-established identities or shared interests, but are moved by the intensity and the density of the affects that circulate among them. ^{Footnote 13} Work on the piece has been mobilised by the thoughtful dimension of sound and music elaborated in the previous parts of this article (as it has troubled and contributed to its conceptualisation), at the artistic, philosophical and political level, and appears to be in this sense an original case of phonosophic practice (Sound example 1).

How does a practice orient itself among the countless components of the event? What techniques are required by the creative process to maximise the expressive potentialities of the musical agencement? How does a community emerge in a given acoustic ecology? Such musical and political issues stemming from the creation of the piece Résonances manifestes have found a relevant avenue of exploration in the concept of comprovisation. ^{Footnote 14} Comprovisation is here approached, following author and composer Sandeep Bhagwati (Reference Bhagwati and Paquet2010: 10), as a set of compositional techniques for practices of collective improvisation that rely on singular indications able to orient the musicians without repressing their ‘spontaneous’ expression. The indications could be understood as virtual rules ^{Footnote 15} that inflect contingency through the relative stabilisation of certain elements of the context to act as a support for the musical coming-into-relation of the different components forming the agencement that creates the performance (Nesbitt Reference Nesbitt, Criton and Chouvel2015: 189–92). But the relationships between the various components of the musical agencement are not, as such, the only desires mobilising the production of a piece and/or a performance: what is at stake is also the search for the aesthetic quality, that is, the maximisation of the expressive capacities of the musical agencement.

Always singular and immanent, each musical agencement begins from a problem to be unfolded through the (comprovised) performance: and it is this problem that will determine the type of virtual rule/enabling constraint chosen. These virtual rules coming to support the current expression of the bodies composing the musical agencement often takes the form of a score. The good score is thus the one that makes it possible to address the affective issues related to the singular problem that mobilises the formation of the agencement. Good, in a Spinozist-Deleuzian ethical sense, that is to say as a structure (shaped from the singularity of the (musical) event) of composition of the lived relationships increasing the expressive power of the agencement.

Among the multiple actualisations of the affective community, autonomous political demonstrations appeared as privileged moments through which communities get consistency from the collective perception of sonic elements. It is very often when such gatherings take to the streets that we can see how the affective power of sound acts like a magnetic force, and comes to make us feel the collective in a kind of sensitive immediacy. Such emotional power is evidently at work in certain musical practices. What happens in these moments that take bodies in spite of themselves, before any reflection? The use of recorded ambient sounds appeared particularly relevant to address such a problem focused on the porosity of the common to the environment. So relevant that it appealed to the composition of a sound score.

The score of the piece Résonances manifestes is composed of sounds of demonstrations that have been captured through a sound study realised in the streets of Montreal between 2015 and 2018. This sonic inquiry on the affective communities occurring during the demonstrations has involved hours of recording, listening and note taking, in a continual cycle of composition ^{Footnote 16} that have set the rhythm of the study. A sound study that was not only an opportunity to capture the main materials for the sound score of the piece, but that was also crucial in the development of its internal organisation. Indeed, the reflections that emerged from this process of inquiry oriented the structuring of the piece in nine movements, each expressing an affective tonality ^{Footnote 17} experienced in autonomous demonstrations. These affective tones are sometimes linked to specific moments (e.g., the sudden riot police attack linked to fear-anger affects), but are never totally dependent on them (Sound example 2).

The elaboration of the sound score required a patient sound editing studio work in order to highlight the contrasts and reduce the impact of some disturbances while preserving the roughness that characterises the (sonic) experience of the demonstrations. This editing work was a technical issue in itself: it was a matter of accentuating the qualities already present to support the indicative function of the sounds, rather than authorising all possible alterations, which would have risked breaking the link to the recording context, and therefore one of the specificities of the piece. ^{Footnote 18} In other words, too much sound editing work could have dissipated part of the affective force of these sounds by blurring their physical-actual dimensions, which would have made certain conceptual operations of perception (through which these sounds can be associated with the demonstrations) difficult, thereby lowering their charge of potential. On the other hand, the creation of the piece was mobilised by a non-representational relationship to politics: it was therefore not a question of generating a documentary, or even touristic (‘as if you were on the demo’) relationship to the demonstrations, but rather to share the affective tonalities which marks these singular moments of the common,Footnote ¹⁹ to start from these materials to compose new blocks of sensations with their own life. This was achieved through different editing interventions, like the parsimonious use of some sound effects on specific passages of the score to amplify a singular sonic quality, which was a way to alter the sonic recognition and the identification of the lived events to put the attention on what was implied by the sounds, their potential affective charge (Sound example 3).Footnote ²⁰

These technical considerations bring back on another angle the ambivalent dimension of the positions of subject and object stressed by process philosophy: an ecological perspective cannot limit itself to fixed positions such as the ‘subjectivity’ of the composer and the ‘objectivity’ of the sound environment. Sound materials preserve autonomy, they always resist, at some point, the operations of capture. Even more, they can act as the true subjects of a musical event. And that is what they do in the piece Résonances manifestes: the field recordings composing the sound score not only have their own musicality – with which the musicians of the ensemble have to play – but also this musical expression is effectively productive: it provokes, catalyses, extends, pushes the bodies touched by it to consider these sounds not only as objects, but also as true subjects taking part in the performance. ‘As’ the musicians, they can indeed change the mood, contribute to the melodic lines or counterpoints, impose or instil a specific rhythm, etc.: they participate in the phonosophic practice that is then occurring.

Such an agency does not necessarily dissolve all the interventions of the musicians in the field of pure contingency, but it undermines the intentionality and the personality that often reside at the core of the music production. Rather than being only the sum of the addition of individual inspirations, the musical performance then becomes the result of the encounter between human and non-human actors (with different perceptive capacities, different expressive potentialities). The sound score based on field recordings of ambient sounds ^{Footnote 21} thus poses listening as such as a central element of the process of comprovisation: collective perception plays a big role here in the becoming-together of the musical agencement. Because it is, once again, a matter of agencement: it is only according to the collective agencements that perception operates and participates in machines of expression and processes of subjectification (Guattari and Rolnik Reference Guattari and Rolnik2007: 45). Indeed, as Gilbert Simondon (Reference Simondon2013: 353) has shown in his lectures on the perception of the different living beings, the perception of sounds, the way in which a collective entity is affected by sound, orients its very capacity to perceive, to be affected by sounds.

The process of creation of the piece took on the challenge of collective listening in the heat of the moment: the musicians of the ensemble had to learn to elaborate common ears, in a way. In fact, if the collective orientation of the ensemble was mainly based on its listening skills, it is because listening came to be a real material for the piece. This is why the composition of Résonances manifestes involved, in the months before the first performance, a series of listening and reflection workshops with the musicians of the ensemble. This collective training was made necessary in regard to the plurality of sound interventions in the piece. Such a posture has proven to be demanding, requiring not only versatile concentration and opening to unpredictability, instability and loss of bearings, but also excitement and collective intensity which very often mark the autonomous demonstrations. ^{Footnote 22} But such a creative posture of alert and feverish openness has also proven to be uncomfortable for musicians, since it breaks with the metaphysics of individual subjectivity that underlies a large number of musical approaches (Nesbitt Reference Nesbitt, Criton and Chouvel2015: 187–8). There is something risky in these decisive turning points which escape personal will, a risk which can also be the occasion for a magnificent concordance in the adventurous moment, where this fragility of the individual artist turns into a common force that exceeds the sum of its components. A vibrant ecology emerging from a loss of reference points to find others through joint research work and mutual trust in intuitions, which allows for affective densification.

7. Thought-music and ecosophy

As intensification and refinement of listening, music as such is a practice of sustained attention to tones that can actively contribute to the collective flexibilisation of sound perception. By its capacity to generate percepts, that is to say ways of perceiving, music is able to open listening to what remains in the imperceptible, to make appreciable what was previously considered to be a disturbance, to distinguish nuances, textures, the play of vibrations, contrasts, continuities and discontinuities. Isn’t music aimed at exploding the lived perceptions in sound events that transport, invigorate listening itself? ^{Footnote 23}

But that does not only concern musical aesthetics: the broadening and the flexibility of perception is a political issue in itself; in fact, refining common perceptions may never have been more crucial, as this epoch can be described as collective torpor, a numbness and/or stiffness in the capacity to share perceptions of the situation. To think between music, philosophy and politics incites to seek the rhythms underlying formal meanings, to explore the multiplicities populating life, to pay attention to potentials of resonance, to start from the productive instability of relationships, to emphasise the openness of processes. This is what the composer and author Pascale Criton (Reference Criton, Criton and Chouvel2015: 11) calls a ‘music-thought’: ‘an ethical posture whose impact is political, an ecology of signs turned towards the play of differences, more than ever very topical’. The elaboration of this ‘music-thought’ will probably need to depart from the logos and its logic of seizure and representation – that remains in the concept of ecology – to embrace the strange and distant relation to knowledge that lives in the sophia. And for this, phonosophy will be a path to explore further, from different trajectories towards multiple experimentations. This one was only a beginning.